MOVIE INFO:
Rose (Marin Ireland) is a pathologist who prefers working with corpses over social interaction. She also has an obsession — the reanimation of the dead. Celie (Judy Reyes) is a maternity nurse who has built her life around her bouncy, chatterbox six-year-old daughter, Lila (A.J. Lister). When one tragic night, Lila suddenly falls ill and dies, the two women’s worlds crash into each other. They embark on a dark path of no return where they will be forced to confront how far they are willing to go to protect what they hold most dear.
REVIEW:
Birth/Rebirth is a feminist sci-fi- horror spin on the Frankenstein story. The mad scientist is a chilly pathologist , Dr Rose Casper (Marin Ireland) prone to fudge pregnancy tests so she can gather fetal tissue for her reanimation experiments done in the secrecy of her apartment. It starts off with bringing a pig back to life and is now progressing to smuggling suitably deceased children out of the hospital in her extra large but not too large wheeled luggage. Elsewhere, the other part of what would eventually be a co-parenting experience, an overworked maternity nurse, Celie (Judy Reyes) struggles to find time for her lively six-year-old daughter, Lila (A.J. Lister). When Lila succumbs to a deadly infection, a guilt wracked Celie and an avid Rose will find common purpose in revivfying the child’s corpse.
Birth/Rebirth is both mad and monstrous. The story, written by the director Laura Moss and Brendan J. O’Brien, has its suitably gory moments. The more squeamish ones are the painless common medical procedures every new mother must endure- amniocentesis and other slightly invasive procedures. It really drives home the indignities the medical community inflicts on mothers and the whole procreation process.
The real story involves the loss of affection between birth mother and child when another substitute mother enters the picture. When Lila died the imprinting bond with Celie also passed to a certain extent. When she was reanimated (the rebirth of the title) she imprinted on Rose, like a duckling which follows a human around because it was the first thing the hatchling has seen. Moss makes the drama work by focusing on the emotions of the two. Rose is a first time mother honing in to her parental instincts. Celie, whose grief is overarching, would prefer a zombie child to no daughter at all. How the two negotiate their divides is the really interesting part of Birth/Rebirth. I didn’t necessarily buy the science. The relationship- very much so. It was strangely moving in the best way.
The two are co-parenting a monster. It gets both the freaky horror of pregnancy and the child rearing process right. Moss is just giving it a more intimate and feminist perspective. It questions and shows how far mothers are willing to go for their children or to simply become mothers at all. If it seems extreme it’s because society tends to push such women to extreme places.
Birth/Rebirth gets a 3.5/5 or a B+. It’s streaming on both Hulu and Shudder.
CREDITS:
Directed by
Laura Moss
Written by
- Laura Moss
- Brendan J. O’Brien
Produced by
- Mali Elfman
- David Grove Churchill Viste
Starring
- Marin Ireland
- Judy Reyes
- A.J. Lister
- Breeda Wool
- LaChanze
Cinematography
Chananun Chotrungroj
Edited by
Taylor Joy Mason
Music by
Ariel Marx
Production
companies
- Shudder
- Retrospecter Films
- Elfman + Viste
Distributed by
Release dates
- January 20, 2023(Sundance)
- August 18, 2023
Running time
101 minutes[1]
Country
United States
Language
English
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