You probably only need to watch the first few seconds of birth/rebirth, the uncommonly effective new body horror nightmare from first-time director Laura Moss, to know whether or not you’ll be able to hang with it. The film opens with a POV shot, placing the viewer inside the head of an expectant mother in the middle of what appears to be a particularly difficult birth. “Your baby’s going to be okay,” a nurse gently assures the camera, pointedly making no such prognosis regarding the mother herself as the monitors flatline. We then cut abruptly to a young woman– presumably the mother whose perspective we were just inhabiting– lying dead on a slab, her organs nonchalantly being removed one by one by a bored-looking morgue attendant. By the time the opening credits roll, the message is clear: this is a film which will pull no punches, emotional or visceral. If you can’t handle that, you can probably go ahead and tap out now.
The opening scene also serves to introduce us to our two leads. The nurse is Celie (Judy Reyes), a dedicated single mom who sticks it out through graveyard shift after graveyard shift to support her livewire daughter, Lila (A.J. Lister). The pathologist is Dr. Rosalind Casper (Marin Ireland), a quiet, peculiar woman who spends her free time conducting cryptic experiments and who doesn’t seem like she’d see much of the sun even if she didn’t spend her days in a basement surrounded by corpses. The two women cross paths under the worst of possible circumstances: the unthinkable happens to Lila, and Celie’s grief is compounded when her daughter’s body seemingly disappears from the morgue. Following the paper trail to Rose’s apartment, Celie discovers her daughter– comatose, but alive– the grand result of Rose’s secret research into the mysteries of life and death. Against Rose’s protests, Celie moves in, and the two enter into a curious sort of co-parenting arrangement. Celie hopes against hope that Lila might be able to resume the life she was meant for– but, as a wise man once said of a similar situation, sometimes dead is better.
birth/rebirth walks a delicate line. Played lightly in a horror movie context, this sort of material might seem exploitative or mean-spirited; conversely, too heavy a hand would risk turning this into another ponderous “elevated horror” slog. Moss and her cast, however, make it look easy. This is a truly frightening film, not least for how grounded its core horrors are in emotional reality. Lila’s death is horrifying in its sheer lack of horror movie-ness: a missed phone call, a note on the table, an illness undiscovered until it’s far too late, and Celie’s life is irrevocably altered before she can even make it to the hospital. Reyes does phenomenal work selling both the heartbreak and the determination of her character, a woman so goodhearted that you want to see her succeed in this clearly insane and unwinnable situation. In perhaps the ultimate sniff-test for a horror movie lead, one can easily picture her in a non-horror version of the same story.
Yet as harrowing as birth/rebirth is, it is buoyed by an unmistakable wit and a blackly comic sensibility. Much of this is down to Ireland, who creates in Dr. Casper a mad scientist for the ages. There is more than a little of Jeffrey Combs’ Herbert West in Ireland’s performance, all wide eyes, curt replies, and a complete and utter lack of bedside manner (because why would she need it?). The dynamic between Rose and Celie takes on the tone of the world’s most fucked-up sitcom, as these two diametrically opposed strangers bicker and snipe over how best to raise their catatonic zombie child (in one of the funniest running gags, Rose is aghast at Lila’s insistence on constantly watching repetitive and cheaply animated cartoons: “Didn’t they sing this song in the last episode?”). A familiar face in supporting roles (she was one of Robert De Niro’s daughters in The Irishman), Ireland has previously proven herself a more than able horror lead in 2020’s The Dark and the Wicked; with this performance, she joins the ranks of actors whose names I will seek out.
Crucially, these two modes never feel at odds with each other, but rather work in tandem to create a singularly disquieting whole. This is not a horror movie in the “jump out and say boo” sense, but rather in the sickly feeling that you know that this is all radically wrong and is going to end very, very badly. Celie almost certainly realizes this as well, but is too blinded by grief and mad, desperate hope to step off this dangerous path; Rose is either too crazy to know, or too sociopathic to care. It is a curious flip of the fright film script: the horror mostly comes from the relatability of its protagonist, and the humor comes from the depravity of the mad scientist.
If there is a flaw to birth/rebirth, it’s that it never goes quite as crazy as it might; while things do, of course, go very, very wrong, the film never quite reaches the all-hell-breaks-loose catharsis that one might expect from this sort of material. Still, I’m loath to knock a smarter-than-average genre film for not adhering to convention, and birth/rebirth is one of the smartest and most assured in some time. It clearly announces Moss as a voice to watch in the indie horror realm, and anyone who’s watched their share of these films will know better than to take the outstanding chemistry of its lead performances for granted. birth/rebirth will certainly not be for all constitutions, but to those with a taste for body horror it is a nasty little delight.
birth/rebirth
2023
dir. Laura Moss
98 min.
Now playing at the AMC Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers
