James Whale would probably approve of Birth/Rebirth, a new take on the Frankenstein story which, like Whale’s 1931 movie, is creepy, dark and yet shot through with a touching humanity. Until it isn’t.
It’s a female take, with the focus largely on women, plus a female director, who also co-wrote, and the cinematographer, composer, editors, production designers and so on are mostly women too.
Plus two stars in Marin Ireland and Judy Reyes who play either side of a familiar stereotype. On one side the monstrous feminine of Rose Casper (Ireland), an emotionless pathologist in a hospital morgue who is secretly collecting genetic material to further experiments into the reanimation of dead people. On the other Reyes as Celie, the caring maternity nurse whose daughter Lila (AJ Lister) suddenly dies, the perfect opportunity for Rose to further her experiments into re-animation.
It’s when Celie discovers that Lila’s body has gone missing, quickly tracks it down to Rose’s apartment, and discovers that Lila has been vaguely re-animated that the story suffers its only real moment of psychological improbability. You’ll just have to take it on trust seems to be the idea. As Celie does – she moves in with Rose to be closer to her largely lifeless daughter. Rose (from the dead, presumably, the film’s only stab at humour, if that’s what her name is), meanwhile, continues to tweak a bit more humanity into Lila medically and a strange odd-couple dynamic develops between the birth mother and the rebirth mother – the warm, hispanic maternity nurse and the cold, stary-eyed scientist.
It’s Dr Frankenstein and Igor, really, with a bit more give and take, though director Laura Moss and her regular co-writer Brendan O’Brien (one of very few men involved) expend a lot of energy covering their tracks. This is their first full-length feature together after having made several shorts and they know what they’re doing – the leaving of subtexts as subtexts, for example. You can read meanings into this movie – it’s about medical ethics, or humans playing at god, or whatever – but it functions entirely comfortably as a straightforward story with some David Cronenburg moments of visceral horror.
Ireland and Reyes work well together. The cool and the warm. Dark-haired and pasty-faced, Ireland has a look of the wild Andrea Riseborough about her this time out – and it would be easy to imagine Riseborough in the role – and it’s nice to see that Ireland is having a moment in the sun. She was the making of The Dark and the Wicked, for instance, another horror movie with real flavour.
Reyes, still best known for the TV show Scrubs, where she played a nurse, brings some of that flavour to this role, but Celie is also a toughie, a tiger momma once roused and to a large extent it’s Reyes who carries the movie in emotional terms.
There’s a womblike quality to the production which really suits the story, with cinematography by Chananun Chotrungroj that’s warm and dark, and a soundtrack (by Ariel Marx) of synths and choirs and little jazzy moments, all wrapped up sonically in the aural equivalent of amniotic fluid.
So, does the monster get off the slab and do the villagers eventually arrive with pitchforks and flaming torches? Why ruin a good story, but the answer is no. In any case the identity of the actual monster is partly what’s this about. It’s obviously Rose, yet the way that Celie’s character is pushed in Rose’s direction, as she does more and more desperate things to support her daughter’s continued semi-existence, raises at least half a question there too.
It’s a slippery path and once embarked on, once Celie has gone through the first “thus far and no further” boundary, what is going to stop her? It’s this slither towards the gruesome that gives the movie its wings. Its creepiness. It remains highly watchable right to the very end.
Birth/Rebirth – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
