‘birth/rebirth’ Movie Review: Maternal “Frankenstein” Story Goes There
Photo from IFC FIlms/Shudder
From Jeremy Kibler
Writer-director Laura Moss and co-writer Brendan J. O’Brien’s birth/rebirth is an effective motherly interpretation of the classic Frankenstein story. Combining body horror and morality with close attention to medical accuracy, this is one upsetting and deeply fucked-up horror feature debut with two excellent lead performances.
Marin Ireland plays Dr. Rose Casper, a cold, antisocial pathologist who has a great relationship with cadavers — no one has to talk. When she’s not working, she’s still working and experimenting with reanimating the dead. Just as Bronx single mom and maternity nurse Celie Morales (Judy Reyes) loses her 6-year-old daughter Lila (A.J. Lister) to a fatal case of bacterial meningitis, the two women end up meeting in unlikely circumstances. Where the film goes from there should be left to the viewer’s discovery.
Believe me or not, birth/rebirth can often be darkly funny, but it clearly isn’t some wacky co-parenting farce. This is disturbing stuff about reversing the nature of death, and how both women react to this idea as foils is what makes the film so compelling and chilling. For Rose, it’s an experiment toward science. For Celie, it’s about getting her daughter back. In a way, the real Frankenstein’s monster being stitched together isn’t Lila but the monster created from these two women’s individual traits bleeding into the other. They complement each other, but then they also become one.
Marin Ireland is tremendous, playing Rose as a shifty-eyed, chilly oddball but also a genius, and the source of the gallows humor usually comes from her deadpan, no-nonsense demeanor. Best known for her work in TV (Scrubs and Devious Maids), Judy Reyes gets so much to play as Celie, a film role written for her. She’s warm and fiery. Her turn as a mother who would do anything to get her daughter back and crosses the point of no return is heartbreaking and frightening; we understand why she does what she does.
birth/rebirth isn’t even one of the most violent or goriest films in recent memory, but it is a film that gnaws at you and puts you off in the directions it dares to go. The scenes that are meant to be squirm-inducing don’t even feel gratuitous or shocking in a hollow way, just vital to the story. Ariel Marx’s creepy, otherworldly score helps create this off-putting mood, too, taking sounds from fetal heart monitors and sonograms and even voices of the director and their family to make a singular soundscape.
Given the material, birth/rebirth can be an unpleasant experience, even as horror films go. That’s the power of horror, especially when the fantastical is grounded in reality. It isn’t the first or the last story to interpret Mary Shelley’s story, but Laura Moss’ film truly haunts one to the core.
Rating: 3.5/5
birth/rebirth hits theaters on August 18, 2023, followed by a Shudder streaming release on November 10, 2023.
