Few concepts are more fruitful for lesbian horror than U-Hauling. Only a short time after meeting a woman, your life is suddenly merged with hers. Often, you know very little about her family, her friends, or her past. Sure, you’ve had deep conversations, and done plenty of processing, but nothing can prepare you for actually diving into the deep end of someone else’s history.
Between 2018’s What Keeps You Alive, and the new Danish film Attachment, streaming now on Shudder, U-Haul horror is on the verge of becoming a bona fide microgenre — and that’s a welcome development for anyone who’s ever shacked up with someone too soon.
Written and directed by Gabriel Bier Gislason, Attachment tells the story of former actress Maja (Josephine Park) and Jewish scholar Leah (Ellie Kendrick), who leap headlong into a relationship after a chance meeting at a library. After Leah experiences a seizure, Maja goes back home with her to London, where Leah’s Orthodox mother Chana (Sofie Gråbøl) seems a little too invested in her daughter’s recovery.
Thrust together into a shared living space in the middle of a Hasidic neighborhood, the three women navigate a tangled web of, well, attachments: Maja is suspicious of the care Chana provides, especially the mysterious bowls of chicken noodle soup that are only served to Leah. Chana is protective of Leah, and perhaps understandably wary of her daughter’s brand-new girlfriend. Caught in the middle, Leah juggles conflicting allegiances, all while things go bump in the night. Add in a helping of Jewish mysticism and you’ve got an allegorically rich queer horror movie that’s perfect to watch on Valentine’s Day with a special someone whose middle name you don’t even know.
Indeed, in addition to being a welcome addition to the LGBTQ+ horror canon, Attachment is also steeped in Jewish folklore, with the supremely watchable character actor David Dencik, who plays Leah’s uncle, providing just the right amount of exposition about mythical figures like the dybbuk, a sort of tortured possessing spirit.
Jewish folklore remains one of the most untapped sources for horror cinema — it has been a long road from 1937’s The Dybbuk to the current boomlet of dybbuk films — which makes Attachment an especially gratifying watch. Amid an endless sea of Catholic-themed exorcism films, it’s refreshing to see a different spin on a possession concept, even if some of the core underlying terrors are similar. As Maja herself points out to Lev, a dybbuk is “like a ghost,” to which Lev counters “No, it’s not like a ghost at all.” In a sense, they’re both right, and that productive tension between the universal and the particular ought to inspire more filmmakers to mine their own specific traditions for genre terrors.
No matter what religious tradition you’re steeped in, the core dynamic between Maja, Leah, and Chana is eerily relatable for any openly queer person who’s ever gone home with their new partner and found themselves trying to answer a bevy of confounding questions at once: Do my partner’s parents hate me for who I am — or are they just not very nice people? How do I draw the line between conforming to the traditions of this household and standing up for myself? And where do I rank in the hierarchy of this family as an outsider and new romantic partner? Attachment mines the anxiety of those dilemmas for everything they’re worth, packing every glance and tone full of painful meaning. It’s grimly funny in moments, but also poignant in its exploration of thwarted connection.
Because as much as we joke about U-Hauling, it reveals a hunger to know and be known, completely, thoroughly, and ideally as quickly as possible. Maja is willing to figure out what’s going on in this strange new environment, not because she wants to defuse its otherness but because she wants to render it familiar. Attachment might make you think twice about impulse-buying that one-way plane ticket, but it shouldn’t make you ashamed to feel hard and fast. Love itself is a sort of tortured possession — a lot like a dybbuk, but also not like a dybbuk at all.
Attachment is now streaming on Shudder.
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