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When the Bough Breaks | 2016 | PG-13 | - 6.6.3

A professional couple (Morris Chestnut and Regina Hall) desperately wants a baby to make their lives perfect, but are unable to conceive. They try every option available and as a last resort they hire a young woman (Jaz Sinclair) to carry their embryo, but problems begin when she becomes obsessed with the husband. Her psychotic behavior puts the couple's lives in danger. Also with Theo Rossi, Romany Malco, Michael K. Williams and GiGi Erneta. Directed by Jon Cassar. [1:33]

SEX/NUDITY 6 - A man kisses a woman wearing a long gown with straps that bares some cleavage: the camera cuts to a couch where the man and woman appear to be nude (we see their bare shoulders and part of his upper chest in close-up), the camera cuts back and we see her back as she moves up and down in his lap, obscured by furniture (another woman looks through a window and sees them). A man pushes a woman against a wall and kisses her, she kisses him passionately, she says, "Everything I am is yours," as she drops a robe in close-up (we only see her bare shoulders), he rubs her arm and face, squeezes her thigh in close-up and the scene ends (sex is implied).
 A party scene includes women wearing long gowns with straps that bare a little cleavage. In several different scenes two women wear short nightgowns that expose some cleavage. A woman wears a short robe in two scenes that reveals cleavage. A pregnant women's yoga class shows a dozen women wearing tight tops and tight-fitting yoga pants. Two scenes show a woman with a huge swollen belly wearing a tight sweater. A pregnant woman wears a long skirt is slit up to the waist to reveal a bare buttock. A woman wears a series of short-shorts and crop tops that reveal bare abdomen and cleavage. A woman wears another woman's long dress that reveals significant cleavage and a slit up the side to the top of one thigh. A woman in a bubble bath reveals only bare shoulders and bare lower legs. A woman in a bubble bath reveals her lower arms and bare knees.
 A man and a woman kiss repeatedly in a hallway at home as they hug. A woman tries to hug a man and he flinches, pushing her away. A woman wearing a long dress lies on a floor in front of a fire (a large amount of cleavage shows and the slit in her long skirt is pulled open to reveal a bare thigh and partial buttock); she stands up and kisses a married man on the cheek before exiting the room. A woman rolls down her stockings and takes them off from under a knee-length dress as her husband kisses her in close-up after unzipping the back of her dress and kissing one of her shoulders; she says she does not want to have sex, ending the scene.
 A woman accuses a man of forcing her to have sex with him and lying about leaving his wife (please see the Violence/Gore category for more details). A woman tells her husband to do whatever it takes (sex implied) to convince a woman carrying their embryo that he is in love with her, so the baby will stay safe. A man says to a woman, "You're just a uterus."
 A pregnancy surrogate puts the father's hand on her un-swollen tummy, presumably to feel the baby, and he pulls his hand away. A woman wearing a scarf and short-shorts, writhes to dance music and a man enters and tells her to stop as his wife walks in the front door. A pregnancy surrogate sends the father a video of her to his work computer and we see her torso as she pulls up a T-shirt to reveal the word BABY written in red lipstick on her stomach; the man texts her to stop and she sends another video in which she is topless, wearing a scarf around her neck to cover her breasts and as she pulls away the scarf the camera cuts to the man's shocked face (we do not see nudity). A woman wearing a robe appears at a glass door as a man on a ladder fixes a gutter overhead in a nighttime rain storm; she opens the robe and from behind, we see bare upper buttocks and the side of one breast (no nipple) as the man looks upset and leaves the area. In three scenes a woman tells a married man: "I want you", "I need you", and "Kiss me," and he denies her all three times.
 A woman, undergoing an ultrasound and impregnation lies on a gurney with her knees and lower legs bare as a doctor places a vial presumably containing an embryo into a device that forces the embryo into an injector tube and another doctor who is facing the camera lowers the tube behind a sheet draped over the woman's knees (no nudity is evident); we see the sonogram screen where white material flows through a tube and the woman grimaces as she flinches and we later hear that she is pregnant. During a sonogram, we see a woman's slightly swollen belly and a blurry image of a male fetus, including a penis.
 A pregnant woman wears a short, tight clingy dress while holding a bottle of champagne and walks into a man's office; he rushes her out the back as his boss walks into the room. A woman goes through another woman's closet and wears borrowed clothing that includes a short coat, a lace bra and skimpy panties; she opens the coat, writhes, falls onto a bed, and rolls around, baring cleavage and one full buttock. At night at a home pool a woman facing away from the camera drops a robe and jumps into the water; from overhead, we see her bare back and buttocks as she swims across the pool.
 We hear that a husband and his wife are unable to conceive a child. An interviewer asks an embryo-implant surrogate if she will be bothered by hormone changes or the fact that implanted embryos may be chosen to be aborted by the biological parents and she says no. A man is fired after his bosses find an inappropriate video on his company PC.

VIOLENCE/GORE 6 - A cloaked figure enters a rundown house and hits a man on the back of the head with something unseen; it stabs him in the kidney, and the stomach twice, with a very long-bladed knife and we see blood flow from the body, on the knife and from the man's mouth; the figure drags the still breathing body to the basement stairs and throws it to the concrete floor.
 A woman has a heavy object in one hand and she hits another woman over the head, felling her, then kicks her hard a dozen times below the frame; the attacker screams and her pregnancy water breaks, streaming from the crotch of her pants and hitting the floor as the other woman calls 911 and the attacker jumps and knocks her out with a punch; the unconscious woman is shown on a gurney and wearing a cervical collar with some blood at the corner of her mouth and she later wakes up with a headache, but no visible wounds and is connected to a blood pressure monitor. A woman holding a long knife rushes out of a house at night and shouts at a man behind her while slashing at him to no avail twice and police pull up as another woman comes out and demands to know what's wrong (please see the Sex/Nudity category for more details).
 A woman places a baby in the back seat of her car as another woman is shown in the driveway with a shotgun and shoots, cracking the windshield as the couple in the car ducks (they are uninjured); the driver runs over the shotgun woman and we see the car hit her midsection and see the body fly over the car and land in a heap on the ground, dead (the baby is unharmed). A man in a darkened house picks up a baby and places it in a car seat just as a woman sneaks up behind him and hits him in the head with something unseen; he falls face down with a bloody scalp and the car seat lands safely on the floor as the woman stabs the man in the lower back and buttocks with something that looks like a long knife or poker (we see some blood); the man stands and slams the woman into a tabletop, and she leaps on his back and beats his head with her fists as he backs into a large glass cabinet door forcefully, shattering it loudly (the woman falls unconscious and the man limps to the car).
 A woman calls her lawyer and reports a problem: he drives to her house and finds her in the back of a police car, crying and with her mouth and nose bloody as her boyfriend is being arrested for domestic assault and battery, a police officer says that the man will be released and she says he will hurt her as she cries violently and hugs the man she called; the boyfriend shouts violently and rushes forward, stopped by two police officers who slam him onto a car hood and at the police station, the lawyer shows the criminal a restraining order and charges for domestic assault and battery as he tells the criminal to stay away from the woman or, "I'll bust your head open," and the criminal smirks.
 A man enters a house and slaps a woman hard in the face; she cries out and falls down, dropping a drinking glass that shatters on the floor as he shouts and she says that he is drunk (he does not appear to be so); the man curses and demands that she extort a couple for large amounts of money. A man at a bar table rubs a woman's back, then twists her arm hard and squeezes the back of her neck to make her yelp while demanding that she extort a couple. A woman argues with a man and touches a pair of large scissors; the man puts his hand over hers and takes her away from the scissors.
 Two men break into an old house and walk down dark basement stairs while coughing many times; we see a dead man on the floor, covered in blood, torn body tissue, dirt and maggots. A woman at home alone hears a door open and shut, followed by a music box playing and she finds a nursery torn up and wrecked with debris everywhere; she approaches a crib in the darkened room, removes a coverlet, and finds a dead cat stabbed several times, ripped and bloody and she screams. A woman under bubbles in a bath shaves her leg (we see her bare shin), raises the safety razor and removes the blade; she cuts something below the frame, raises the bloody blade and it drips as we see drops of blood fall into water and dissipate (we never see a wound).
 A woman gets into a pickup truck, screams, pounds the dashboard and rips off the rear view mirror. A woman picks up a patio chair and smashes it through a glass patio table, shattering glass loudly. A man and a woman argue mildly in a few scenes about her job promotion. A man and a woman argue loudly in a couple of scenes and in one scene, the woman shouts and rants about someone changing the calendar in her smartphone; in another scene, she shouts at the man about their pregnancy surrogate suggesting that she had sex with him (please see the Sex/Nudity category for more details). A woman says about another woman, "I'll kill her."
 An investigator states that a man was thrown out of the US Navy, having incurred domestic assault and battery charges; his wife or girlfriend was raised in the foster care system, sexually abused repeatedly by a foster father, whom she eventually killed with a pair of scissors. A man tells a woman that he already sold the baby she is carrying to another couple. We hear that a woman entered a hospital, delivered a baby, and then took the baby and disappeared.

LANGUAGE 3 - 2 sexual references, 3 scatological terms, 1 anatomical term, 9 mild obscenities, name-calling (stupid, crazy, strange, weird, punk), exclamations (wow, shut-up), 2 religious profanities (GD), 6 religious exclamations (e.g. Jesus Christ, God, Oh My God).

SUBSTANCE USE - A medicine cabinet is shown with dozens of prescription bottles and a woman handles two bottles that have long medication names on them, and a man says that a woman ordered illegal Mexican drugs to induce labor. A man drinks from a short glass of whiskey in a bar and a man a few stools away has a glass of beer in front of him, a woman walks to a table where a man drinks from a short glass of whiskey, a woman pours two glasses of wine and she and a man drink from them, a man pours a short glass of liquor and the man and a woman drink from the glass, four people at a dinner have three glasses of wine and a bottle of beer in front of them and do not drink, a waiter at a party holds a tray of two glasses of whiskey and a few champagne bottles are shown in chilling buckets, men and women hold glasses of champagne and are not shown drinking, and a man drinks from a bottle of beer in a house. A man lights and smokes a cigarette outside a house at night.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Infertility, surrogacy, embryo implants, foster care, physical and sexual abuse, mental illness, extortion, murder, danger, fear, loss, grief, obsession, anger, revenge, courage, sacrifice, survival, relationships, love, parenthood.

MESSAGE - Infertility can be heartbreaking and the foster care system can be abusive.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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