This is gonna sound crazy…
Main Cast: Hadley Robinson, Emily Hampshire
Director: Anna Zlokovic
Well, that wasn’t what I expected it to be.
Writer/director Anna Zlokovic’s 2023 movie APPENDAGE took me completely by surprise. We focus on young Hannah (Hadley Robinson), a woman just trying to make her way as a fashion designer in New York. She’s got a boyfriend of six months, a best friend who is ride or die, and a mother who constantly makes Hannah feel both invisible and the reason for all the bad things that happen in the world ever. This is partly because, in high school, Hannah crashed her car during one of her mother’s parties, ruining the event and tarnishing the family name—and partly because Hannah’s mother is just one of those uptight, impossible-to-please mothers we’re all familiar with to one degree or another.
During a particularly tense lunch with her parents, Hannah feels a sharp pain in her side, right along a dark birthmark that runs along the side of her stomach. She feels a similar pain after receiving a distressing text. She tells herself it’s nothing to worry about until the night the birthmark throbs, stretches, grows, then detaches completely from her and forms a small, deformed creature independent of her body.
A doctor tells Hannah she may have chimera DNA, so Hannah does what any young 20-something in New York would do: seeks out a support group online. And wouldn’t you know it, there IS just such a group. She attends one of the meetings and the other attendees tell Hannah she isn’t crazy, and that the same thing happened to them. They called these offshoots their “appendages” and the best way to keep them under control—the appendages like to talk, belittling their previous hosts and hypnotizing them to act in ways contrary to their normal personalities—is to keep them sedated.
Hannah befriends another woman, Claudia (Emily Hampshire, Schitt’s Creek), and the two bond very quickly over their shared condition.
APPENDAGE was just one of those stories that you don’t even bother trying to predict the twists and turns, you just go along for the ride. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, but it’s all a guess from one minute to the next just what the hell is going to happen.
Hannah is willful and determined, despite also being completely cowed by her overbearing mother. She’s a woman who knows what she wants, but isn’t always sure she deserves it, even when it’s handed to her. I liked her portrayal, and the growth Hannah undergoes over the course of this journey. The side characters also carried their weight, and when the true villain was revealed it made perfect sense but still felt like a total surprise.
Having said all that, not everything here is so original. The basic plot structure itself has been done to death, and I was just praying the real story would be anything BUT what it was. No such luck. We’ve seen this done before, and we’ve seen it done way better.
Zlokovic would go on later to write and direct one of my favorite shorts from 2025’s V/H/S Halloween (Coochie Coochie Coo), so she’s definitely a fan of the genre, and is making a name for herself. Despite the been-there, done-that aspects of this story, I think APPENDAGE is a step in the right direction. This movie was distributed by Hulu and can be streamed there.
C. Dennis Moore is the author of over 60 published short stories and novellas in the speculative fiction genre. Most recent appearances are in the Dark Highlands 2, What Fears Become, Dead Bait 3 and Dark Highways anthologies. His novels are Revelations, and the Angel Hill stories, The Man in the Window, The Third Floor, and The Flip.
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