Ultrasound Parent Guide

After a tire blows out on the way back from a friend’s wedding, Glen (Vincent Kartheiser) makes a very rainy walk to the nearest home, hoping for some help. There, he meets Art (Bob Stephenson) and his young wife Cyndi (Chelsea Lopez), and things get weird. After being pushed by Art to spend the night with Cyndi, Glen wakes up alone in the house. Assuming that his strange experience is over, he gets his tire replaced and heads home – only for Art to turn up, insisting that Cyndi is pregnant and it must be Glen’s fault. And then Cyndi texts him, insisting that Art is acting crazy and nothing is going on… and that’s only the beginning of Glen’s problems.

This is a deeply odd movie. The plot is incredibly convoluted, winding from Glen’s bizarre experiences, to a military-funded medical study, to a conspiracy around an image-obsessed local senator up for re-election. Frankly, I spent entirely too much time trying to puzzle all these pieces together to really enjoy any of them. And the film certainly doesn’t fit them together for you. I lost focus for about two minutes, and when I snapped back in I felt like I’d fallen asleep on the train and woken up at the wrong stop. I had to rewind to figure out what was supposed to be going on, and that was only marginally helpful.

Ultrasound is not an easy film to talk about. There are so many intertwined plot threads that to talk about one of them in any detail, I’d have to explain the others – which, even if I was sure I could, would not make for particularly interesting reading. If you like this kind of liminal confusion, then this is a must-watch for you.

Of course, that also depends on how comfortable you are with some of the stranger sexual content in this. Without giving too much away, hypnosis is a significant part of this film, and on several occasions, people are hypnotized into believing they’ve had sex with other people. Thankfully, imaginary sex doesn’t lead to much nudity. There are also roughly 40 f-bombs, which really cements this as an adults-only kind of film. Although, in all honesty, I have no idea who the target audience for this movie is. It’s so narratively dense and deliberately obscure that trying to decipher it is a full-time job for the entire runtime. It’s not impossible to figure it out, but most of the time, it’s more trouble than it’s worth.