The Clinic (2010 film)

Plot

The Clinic is set in the year 1978 (six years prior to the advent of DNA testing). A young mother-to-be, Beth, is traveling with her fiancé Cameron. After narrowly avoiding an accident on the road, they stop at a motel in the small town of Montgomery. Cameron goes for a midnight stroll and comes back to find his fiancée missing. After a quick search, Cameron calls the local police. Following the arrival of the police, Cameron attacks the motel owner out of frustration and the authorities arrest him. He later attempts to escape and is killed in a car crash.

Beth later awakens naked in an abandoned warehouse, lying in a bath tub filled with ice and water. She discovers a C-section scar on her abdomen and realizes her baby has been stolen. She also finds a white smock with the Roman numeral DCVIII written on the breast. Alone and afraid for her child, Beth wanders outside of the facility where she finds three other mothers who have also been kidnapped and had their unborn children surgically removed. The group finds another woman, barely alive, with her womb surgically opened, who declares her child to be “blue”.

As the mothers search around, they discover that their babies are alive and locked in cages, with colored clips that are matched to a colored tag sewn inside their true mother's abdomen. The only way to match the mother to the child is to remove the tag from their abdomens, which will lead to death by blood loss. One of the mothers decides the only way to find out which baby is hers is to kill the other women, remove their tag, and find her baby through the process of elimination. One by one, the women are picked off by the crazed mother until Beth catches and fatally injures her. Before she dies, she threatens to drop the remaining tag down a hole unless Beth promises to take care of her baby as well. The woman dies and Beth takes the tag from her hand. She then uses the tags to find the color for her baby. As she returns to find that the babies are no longer in their crib cages, she is knocked out by an unknown assailant.

Beth regains consciousness and finds herself chained to the floor. She sees a Russian couple inspecting her baby and they reveal their scam: prospective parents receive a baby to adopt based on their mother's performance in the warehouse experiment; the winning mother has the strongest child and that child is the one set for adoption. The woman running the operation runs away with Beth's baby. Beth frees herself and confronts her, only to discover that she herself was picked up as a baby from this facility by her adoptive parents. Beth takes her final revenge on the woman and escapes with her child. Months later, she visits the grave site of her biological mother and goes to meet who she believes to be her biological father.

Release

The film was screened in the USA on November 4, 2009 at the American Film Market. Another screening followed on October 10, 2010 at the ScreamFest Horror Film Festival. The move received mixed reviews.

Reception

The Clinic received negative reviews from critics and audiences. Rotten Tomatoes currently has no approval rating but maintains a 26% audience score.

Accolades

Tabrett Bethell was nominated for Best Actress at the Fangoria Chainsaw Awards in 2012.