Fertile Ground

Emily Weaver Leisha Hailey and Nate Weaver Gale Harold are a happily married couple living in New York City, where Nate is a celebrated artist and Emily a fashion designer, and they are eagerly awaiting their first child. A terrible miscarriage during a dinner party shatters that dream, and Emily learns that the scarring on her womb has left her unable to conceive again. To give them both a fresh start, they move to Nate’s family home in the countryside, a place that has sat unused for years.

At first, the house feels magical, but fear quickly surfaces. A skeleton discovered on the property raises questions, and while the remains are old, Emily senses that something about the place is unsettling. A trunk in the cellar filled with old baby belongings prompts a visit to the local Historical Society, which reveals a troubling past: several women died under mysterious circumstances at the house in the 18th and 19th centuries, and Nate’s aunt vanished without a trace when the house was new. The history unsettles Emily, who begins to feel increasingly out of sync with her surroundings.

Nate grows distant and cold, returning to painting and lingering in his own world, while Emily’s pregnancy, though somehow still possible, forces her to endure long rests and a growing sense of isolation. She experiences vivid, disturbing visions of a woman covered in blood and sometimes faints from them. A doctor confirms nothing physically wrong, but visits from the medical professional do little to ease her mind. Then a phone call delivers the shocking news that she is indeed still pregnant, although high-risk factors keep her bedridden for much of the term. As Emily waits in limbo, Nate works longer hours, seemingly uninterested in the baby as her loneliness deepens.

To counter the loneliness, Emily hosts a party for her city friends, hoping to feel connected again, and that night she suspects Nate’s agent of having an affair. The agent suffers a severe accident after the party, falling through a window in Emily’s studio and ending up hospitalized. Nate, furious, questions Emily’s role in the incident, convinced she may have pushed the agent, a suspicion that gnaws at him as the two grow estranged.

With time, Emily uncovers a folder of press clippings left by the Historical Society. The brutal thread runs through the house’s history: every woman who died there while pregnant was killed by her husband. The property, it seems, can “change” the husbands and turn them cruel. A new, even more intense vision of the dead woman follows, and Emily fears that Nate is coming back to kill her. Desperate, she calls her best friend to come and rescue her.

When Nate returns, Emily hides in her bedroom, gripping a knife. A tense struggle ensues, and she aims at Nate but ends up stabbing her friend—who had driven back with Nate—by mistake. She drags herself to the roof in a frantic bid to escape, believing she is fighting one of the ghosts of the house. The struggle spills onto the edge of the roof, and she stabs the figure repeatedly as they fall. Only after the fall does she realize she has killed Nate.

In the bleak aftermath, a hospital scan reveals that Emily was never pregnant after all. The earlier phone calls, Nate’s odd behavior, and the ghostly visions were all symptoms of psychosis she had been experiencing. Left alone in a padded room, she rocks an imaginary child in her arms, haunted by what she has done and what she believed she was fighting. The film closes on a chilling note, turning a domestic tragedy into a battle in the mind.

Last Updated: October 09, 2025 at 15:32