You can fling all the ghosts, ghoulies and gore at the screen you want, but the things that tend to stay with us the most are the more primal fears. Surely, the loss of a child is one of the most primal terrors an adult can face and the horror genre has taken frequent opportunity to take advantage of such a state of being with fairly varied results. Pet Sematary is one such obvious example, so is Ripley’s desperation to keep Newt safe from the creeping, xenomorph horde, but while some examples manage to put the fear of God into people who aren’t even parents, others suffer from making the tykes in peril strangely annoying which dilutes the scares.
Hoping to tap deep into the fear that comes with being a mother, director Laura Moss has plugged into the Frankenstein myth to deliver Birth/Rebirth, a brooding new addition to the hosts of movies that’s riffed on Mary Shelley’s timeless masterpiece – but has Moss managed to birth a classic of her own?
Celie Morales is an overworked maternity nurse whose life revolves around her five year-old daughter, Lila, but while her hours are gruelling, she genuinely loves her job, helping and supporting other women give birth while she solely raises her adoring child. But unfortunately, when it comes to parenting no one bowls a perfect game and you just hope that your mistakes and failures aren’t too serious – however, when Lila claims she’s sick just before Celie leaves for work, she’s left with a neighbour under the pretence that it’s just a fever.
Regrettably it’s not just a fever, it bacterial meningitis and while Celie enjoys a peaceful day at work thanks to her malfunctioning phone, her daughter gets sicker, dies and is processed by the pathology department without her mother ever getting to see her. But while this tragedy is every parent’s nightmare, it turns out that due to some strange goings on at the hospital, Celie might get a second chance and it comes from the exceedingly strange Dr. Rose Casper.
Just as smart as she is incapable of normal, human, interactions, it seems that Rose has something of a side gig going on apart from her job of forensic pathologist and she’s been tirelessly experimenting with ways to beat death and reanimate those that have recently passed. Figuring out that Lila us compatible with her criteria, Rose has spirited the little corpse away to her home to move her experiments into the next phase – however, after realising that her daughter’s body wasn’t never transfered out, an outraged Celie gradually figures out what the driven Rose is up to.
However, when she finds her little girl reanimated, but comatose, she insists on becoming Rose’s partner as they perform some rather unethical deeds in order to get them the serum they need to keep Lila alive. Her little girl may be breathing once more, but how much of her soul is Celie willing to give, in order to restore her child?
I’ll admit that while watching Birth/Rebirth, I was making some assumptions about where the film was ultimately going to go. I mean, you can’t deny that while there’s a strong pulse of Frankenstein going on in those veins, the central partnership and it’s medical setting is more than a little reminiscent of Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator. That too saw a mismatched duo grow ever more determined after the straight-laced and thoroughly decent Dr. Cain get roped into some twisted shit when fellow student Herbert West reveals that he has a magical serum that can beat brain death. If we take the logical step that Judy Reyes is Cain and that the seemingly neurodivergent Rose is the similarly reclusive West, then Moss’s film seems to be locked on to becoming quite the homage minus the comic-book tone and garish sense of humour. However, as Birth/Rebirth continues on its low-key, rather somber journey, we soon find that it’s probably best not to get too caught up in the similarities as both have very different aims.
Simply put, anyone expecting the gory robust blowout of Gordon’s macabre classic may well be best served by checking those thoughts at reception, because Moss isn’t interested in the gory body horror of ressurecting the dead and instead offers up a resolutely female look at the subject. Firstly there’s the bond between mother and daughter that’s rudely severed due to the cruelly tragic drop in parental defences that all parents do eventually; but while that gives Judy Reeves’ character (who certainly didn’t have to deal with this Lovecraftian shit while appearing in Scrubs) the drive to gradually turn her back on her ethics, it’s her growing relationship with Marin Ireland’s fascinatingly eccentric Rose that really drives the film.
While the sexuality of both characters are left vague (although Rose doesn’t care for any relationships, to be fair), as they continue their experiments to try and bring Lila from a somewhat mentally disabled state to something closer to her precocious, pre-death self, they fall into the patterns of a same-sex couple trying to raise a child. Even more interesting is that the more time the two spend together, the more they start to rub off on to one another. Rose (in a remarkable performance by Ireland) goes from being an insular, almost autistic woman, to starting to care for Lila beyond just an experiment, but when inevitable road blocks arise, the equally impressive Reyes ensures that Celie’s formally good interior inexorably takes a more sinister shade as her actions soon put other mothers and their unborn children at risk.
Of course, you can’t have a film that treads so fearlessly in such territory without indulging in some good, old body horror, and while you’d think the nature of a resurrected girl would provide the stuff to make you recoil, it’s Rose’s dedication to her experiments that provide most of the jawdropping moments. Whether it’s the fact that she’s been harvesting her serum from her own placenta after making herself pregnant from semen obtained from extraordinarily awkward bar hookups, or it’s the excruciating toll such a thing takes on her body, Moss mines both for creeps and exceptionally dark laughs.
However, the film is meant to be slow and brooding by design and anyone expecting any grandiose moments of grand guignol might come away from Birth/Rebirth feeling that not a lot actually happens. But even without predictable bursts of violence, Moss’s meditation of the corrupting influences of grief and science makes sure that – for those that are paying attention – the most shocking transformations are all internal.
A brooding examination of motherhood, death and the bonds of womanhood, Birth/Rebirth may play more like the psychological nature of later Cronenberg rather than the earlier, splatterier years, but Moss manages to hook you with the harrowing central concept and then hooks you in just to see where these characters take us.
Won’t someone please stop thinking of the children?…
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