Mudborn

Hsu-Chuan is a game developer at a company building a horror VR experience. During research, he visits a derelict haunted house and takes home a broken clay doll — impulsively, almost as a joke. His wife Mu-Hua, who restores cultural relics for a living, is drawn to the object immediately. She's also pregnant. The doll should be an afterthought. Instead she starts spending hours with it, rebuilding the damaged sections with fresh clay, going quiet in ways Hsu-Chuan can't quite name.

The strangeness arrives gradually. Objects misplaced. Sounds with no source. Mu-Hua more withdrawn, more protective of the doll, speaking to it at night in ways she doesn't fully remember in the morning. The pregnancy amplifies everything — anxiety already runs high, and it becomes difficult to separate what is supernatural from what is simply the weight of impending parenthood. Hsu-Chuan starts to wonder what his wife is actually bonding with.

His attempts to remove the doll are met with Mu-Hua's fierce resistance. She cannot be separated from it. The boundary between the presence in the clay and something more biological begins to blur as her due date approaches.

Hsu-Chuan seeks out a spiritual medium. A history emerges: the doll was made in grief, shaped as a vessel, and what inhabits it has been waiting for exactly these conditions — a home, a woman in late pregnancy, a child on the way. The entity does not view the birth as an ending. It views it as an opening.

The film builds toward a confrontation between Hsu-Chuan and what has taken root in his household — something patient, purposeful, and prepared to outlast him.