Two women nurture a reanimated child in this grisly gynecological horror movie.
Motherhood is both mad and monstrous in “Birth/Rebirth,” Laura Moss’s ultrasmart, ferociously feminist take on the Frankenstein myth. Yet while the story (by Moss and Brendan J. O’Brien) surges to corporeal extremes, the movie is most resonant when — like Prime Video’s “Dead Ringers” and the harrowing AMC+ drama “This Is Going to Hurt” — it resolutely records the gross indignities of everyday procreation.
For Dr. Rose Casper (Marin Ireland), a chilly morgue technician, dead tissue is infinitely more interesting than living. In her dingy apartment in the Bronx, Rose experiments obsessively with reanimation, using embryonic stem cells. (How she obtains them involves a sick joke which I refuse to spoil.) A snuffling pig called Muriel has so far been Rose’s sole success.
Elsewhere in Rose’s hospital, an overworked maternity nurse named Celie (a terrific Judy Reyes), struggles to find time for her lively six-year-old daughter, Lila (A.J. Lister). But after Lila succumbs to a deadly infection, a guilt-wracked Celie and an avid Rose will find common purpose in revivifying the child’s corpse. What follows is a quietly freakish, slyly humorous tale of devoted co-parenting, with Lila serving as daughter to one woman and science experiment to the other.
Wrapped in drab locations and jaundiced lighting (Chananun Chotrungroj’s photography is brilliantly bleak), this grisly gynecological horror movie is not for the squeamish. Pregnancy hasn’t been this perverse since the underappreciated “Alien 3” (1992); yet as the women’s behavior grows ever more shocking — and Ariel Marx’s nerve-plucking score intensifies — Moss offers no rebuke to their heedless amorality. There is only the audience to judge.
And, perhaps, Lila. “I’m not getting enough attention,” she whispers to her mother early in the film. Little did she know that all she had to do was die.
Birth/Rebirth
Rated R for purloined placentas and stolen semen. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
