phancy.com - horror reviews - MOH 2021

Jakob's Wife



IMDb Info

Release Year: 2021
Runtime: 1h 38min
Country: USA
Language: English
Genre Tags: Horror
Plot Summary: Anne, married to a small-town Minister, feels her life has been shrinking over the past 30 years. Encountering "The Master" brings her a new sense of power and an appetite to live bolder. However, the change comes with a heavy body count.

Poster - Title Card


phancy.com rating:

phancy.com notes: A marriage comedy combined with a horror movie, with two excellent lead performances. Vampirism as a feminist symbol, and how it unsettles a biblically traditional marriage.


Outside Reviews:

Sheila O'Malley
3 out of 4 stars - rogerebert.com

Because Crampton and Fessenden so expertly play the rhythms of this repressed couple, two people who barely know how to deal with each other outside of Biblically-prescribed roles, there's no need for the final-act monologue about the limits placed on women's self-expression. Crampton has already shown us the glories of her liberation in that deliberate glamorous stalk through the grocery store, and Fessenden has already shown us the heady blend of fear and excitement Jakob feels when confronted with this new unpredictable creature he's married. He's not entirely displeased with who she's become, even though he is terrified of her too. When Anne says to Jakob in a moment of distress, "You don't know how to fight for me because you've never done it," we have the whole story right there.


Katie Rife
Grade: C+ - Barbara Crampton shows why she's a horror legend in the pulpy, uneven Jakob's Wife

Despite the conviction Crampton and Fessenden bring to their onscreen relationship, however, Jakob's Wife is more successful as a gleeful bloodbath than it is as a character-driven horror-drama. That's mostly due to the screenplay, whose dialogue includes some real clunkers that weigh down the film's loftier ambitions and keep it anchored in the realm of B-horror. Everyone seems to be having fun, however. Who wouldn't, when eating worms and lifting a sofa with one hand like it's made of Styrofoam? Both of those stunts fall to Crampton, by the way, and she attacks them with the enthusiasm of a vampire at a blood bank. After 30-plus years in the industry, she knows how to locate the potential in uneven material. It's why she's a legend.