Watched it yet?
This week, Netflix dropped Chambers – a psychological horror/thriller/drama that once you watch it is sure to make you pretty scared of organ transplants, and even more scared of the rich white people who live down the street.
The series follows Sivan Alyra Rose as Sasha, a 17-year-old girl who has a sudden heart attack requiring an urgent transplant.
Spoilers for the first episode but: she gets it – from another teenager named Becky who died tragically when she was electrocuted in the shower.
While Sasha is trying to readjust to life after suffering a near-fatal heart attack, she meets Becky’s parents who are adamant to have Sasha in their lives.
They invite her over for dinner, they offer to pay for her school fees, and they even give her a car so she can drive herself to school.
But, as with most horror-based scenarios, things are not as they seem – and although Becky’s family may seem fairly well-meaning, there’s a lot of shady shit going on and Sasha is, unfortunately, very much at the centre of it.
Chambers is a good show, if not a tad meandering, and if you’ve watched the first season yet, you’ll no doubt have a few questions.
One of those questions is probably about the newborn baby doll scene – and everything else that comes with it.
Spoilers ahead, obviously.
Becky’s mother Nancy, played by the glorious Uma Thurman, is obviously fairly grief stricken following the death of her daughter. So much so that she starts to experience phantom pregnancy symptoms.
Her doctor isn’t much help so she turns to friend and quasi-cult leader Ruth to see if she has any suggestions.
Ruth offers a “reborn doll” as a solution. “It temporarily offers an emotional replacement after the sudden loss of a child. It’s not the real thing, but it helps,” she says.
The scene is so nondescript that you’d almost be forgiven for missing the exchange entirely. That’s why when Thurman shows up in the next scene with a newborn baby doll in a suitcase, it’s a tad jarring.
Even more so when she throws the thing in the bin.
After this, Nancy’s symptoms only continue to worsen as she notices her C-section scar reappearing on her stomach. She scrubs at it until the skin is raw in a desperate attempt to rid herself of the pregnancy that isn’t really happening.
It remains unclear whether the scar reappearing was a delusion, a hallucination brought on by grief, or if Sasha’s evil spirit had something to do with it.
Realistically, it was probably a combination of all three.
Afterwards, the newborn baby doll isn’t seen again, suggesting that it stayed in the bin where Nancy left it allowing her to process the grief her own way – without the help of something fake and non-living.
There’s enough of that already plaguing this story, as it is.
