Ultrasound Review: An Atmospheric Head-Trip That Leads to a Frustrating Dead End

At the start of Ultrasound, Glen’s (Vincent Kartheiser) car breaks down in the middle of a rainy night. But he finds himself in luck, though, as nearby is the home of Cyndi (Chelsea Lopez) and Art (Bob Stephenson). Though the couple have something of a strained dynamic, they’re friendly and accommodating of Glen’s predicament: The nearest garage won’t open till morning, so they let him stay the night. Then they get a little too considerate, once Art asks Glen to go upstairs and have sex with his much younger wife.

That may sound like the thin plot to an old porno, but Glen’s situation is just the tip of the oddities in store for him, and viewers, throughout Rob Schroeder’s film. Art doesn’t come off as sinister, nor does he seem as though he’s fulfilling a fetish. In fact, when he asks Glen to have sex with his wife, it comes across as a genuine attempt to alleviate her unhappiness.

Nearly half of the film, which has been adapted by Conor Stechschulte from his graphic novel Generous Bosom, goes by before it gives any explanation for the characters’ behavior or the hiccups in reality that they experience. In one scene, Cyndi suddenly disappears after a camera movement briefly obscures our view of her, and when Glen asks where she went, Art seems surprised that he didn’t notice her walk upstairs. But it’s anyone’s guess if she actually did.

Glen and a pregnant Cyndi are eventually seen living together in an apartment that feels every bit as beamed in from another reality as the rest of the film’s details, such as the varying stomach size of another pregnant woman, Katie (Rainey Qualley), who’s having an affair with a senator (Chris Gartin). Everything would seem be connected to the goings-on at a nondescript facility run by Dr. Conners (Tunde Adebimpe), whose psychological researcher, Shannon (Breeda Wool), stages experiments with hypnosis using dialogue spoken by Glen and Cyndi.

Suggesting a less fleshy version of eXistenZ, Ultrasound ultimately reveals Glen, Cyndi, Katie, and others to be buried under layers within layers of mentally constructed reality. And not a single of them is totally sure where reality ends and the induced fantasies begin. But beyond a couple of intriguing moral quandaries about test subjects and military funding, the film leads itself into a dead end. As atmospheric as it is befuddling, Ultrasound is a persuasive advertisement for its source material simply for providing such an intriguing thread to follow, but it never quite figures out how to keep going once its mysteries have been unraveled.