BIRTH/REBIRTH - Mark Reviews Movies

Birth/Rebirth, IFC Films / Shudder

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 17, 2023

Co-writer/director Laura Moss offers a spin on an idea as old as the very concept of science-fiction—that of reanimating the dead—in Birth/Rebirth. The process of achieving that miraculous goal is about as credible as any of the other proposed hypotheses for pulling off such an unnatural trick. The real meat of this story, though, isn't in depicting how a pair of medical professionals accomplish the resurrection and maintenance of a 6-year-old girl. It's in the dire consequences for everyone involved, either by choice or not.

The screenplay, written by Moss and Brendan J. O'Brien, also gives us a diametrically opposed couple of co-protagonists in Rose (Marin Ireland), who has developed the technique after a long period of trial and error, and Celie (Judy Reyes), who finds herself as invested in her colleague's experiment for a personal reason—one that gradually dispenses with any and all ethical or moral concerns. They both want the same thing, albeit with distinct motives and, initially, a different level of how far each one is willing to go to achieve it. As a result, the film becomes as much a study of the inherent flexibility of morality under certain circumstances as it is a thriller and a discomforting horror tale.

We first meet both women in the middle of what seems to be a relatively normal day for both of them. Celie, a nurse on a hospital's maternity ward, is aiding a woman in giving birth to her first child, seen from the terrified, unfocused perspective of the woman in labor. There are complications, leading us to Rose, a pathologist working in the same hospital's morgue. Right away, Moss and O'Brien provide a sense of how different these two characters are, in the empathetic way Celie treats the in-distress pregnant woman and the newborn, as opposed to the cold, calculated, and silently efficient way Rose performs an autopsy.

Without saying too much, Moss is also pulling off something else entirely with this opening sequence, simply by way of perspective. This is a little detail, compared to everything else the film is doing, but after seeing a certain narrative gimmick done to excess and with no logical reason so often, it's refreshing to see a filmmaker use the same plot device for a specific purpose and without giving away that it's actually happening in the moment.

Some other distinctions emerge. Celie is a single mother to Lila (A.J. Lister), whom she has to leave with a neighbor before an upcoming shift—because the girl has a fever that morning and there's no other option available to a hurried Celie. Meanwhile, Rose is single and lives alone in a spacious apartment, which is handy for the home laboratory she has made for herself. Apart from work, Rose does go out on occasion, although her purpose in doing so is probably best left undetailed here, if only because some of the surprise in this premise should be preserved.

The plot, though, begins when Celie, who hasn't been able to answer her neighbor's phone calls for an assortment of reasons, returns home to pick up Lila. As it turns out, the girl had a bacterial infection, and before Celie can make it back to the hospital, her daughter is already in the morgue, being processed by Rose.

There's little time for grief, though, when Celie discovers that Rose has taken Lila's body home with her. There's even less time for outrage, because Rose has somehow brought the girl back to life. Celie decides to move in with Rose, in order help in keeping her reanimated daughter alive.

From there, this narrative operates—and with fair success—on three different levels. The first, of course, is the thriller aspect of the plot, which has the two women taking riskier and—to put it mildly—more questionable actions in order to obtain the ingredients necessary for making the serum that keeps Lila resurrected. Because the story operates on certain primal levels—of the fear of death, of a parent's unconditional love, of pure obsession—to keep it moving, the whole process, as absurd as it is and as awful as it slowly becomes, is comprehensible and, to some degree, sympathetic.

In terms of the film working as a horror story, it is that for a lot of the same reasons. The sight of Lila is unsettling and, from the point of view of Celie, unthinkable, because here is this parent's daughter, completely recognizable but also no longer herself—an empty husk of a human body that breathes and moves but is absent of the spark of the girl she once was. It's a terrifying prospect, and that's just Celie's predicament. We're also confronted with the sacrifices Rose makes of her own body to continue her secretive work and the introduction of an expectant mother (played by Breeda Wool), who has no clue that she has become an unwitting, vital component of Rose's experiment.

Of primary concern, though, is how the film works as a character study of desperation and fixation, anchored by strong performances from Ireland and, particularly, Reyes. The stillness of Ireland's work is commendable, especially in the subtle moments when she hints at some deeper pain driving her work (a look of disappointment when another revived patient doesn't seem as interested in her as in her new roommate and the tenderness she shows to Lila).

Reyes, though, plays the broken heart and guilty conscience of Birth/Rebirth, while also convincing us that the latter can be sacrificed entirely because of the former. The film presents us with a series of dreadful dilemmas, but the real dread is in the honesty of the cost these characters are willing to pay in order to solve them.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products