Director – Laura Moss, Screenplay – Laura Moss & Brendan J. O’Brien, Producers – Mali Elfman & David Grove Churchill Viste, Photography – Chananun Chotrungroj, Music – Ariel Marx, Visual Effects Supervisor – Eric Yu, Visual Effects – Gearshift Productions, Special Effects Supervisor – Eugene Hitt, Production Design – Courtney Andujar & Hillary Andujar. Production Company – Retrospecter/Elfman + Viste.
In the Bronx, ER nurse Celie Morales goes to work, leaving her daughter Lila in the charge of a neighbour. She is then traumatised to come out of surgery to find that Lila has died of viral meningitis. However, when she goes to claim the body, she finds it has gone missing from the morgue. It has been stolen by morgue doctor Rose Casper. Celie has suspicions of Rose and breaks into her apartment to find that Rose has Lila’s body alive using experimental processes she has devised. She immediately decides to move in and help Rose. They have remarkable results and soon Lila is awake and then talking and walking. Rose needs to harvest foetal tissue in order to keep Lila alive and has been impregnating herself to incubate these. However, an end is put to this when she starts to haemorrhage. The only choice would appear to be to harvest cells from Emily Parker, a pregnant woman who is a match, and for Rose to fake records to keep bringing Emily in for an amniocentesis.
Birth/Rebirth was a directorial debut for Laura Moss who had previously made several short films and written the screenplay for The Rest of Us (2019). The film premiered at Sundance and featured at a number of other international film festivals.
Marin Ireland is an actress who has been on the rise in recent years. Her part here quite takes you aback – it is coldly unemotional and almost the complete antithesis of the glamour you expect of a role. It is fascinating to watch as we see the detached calmness with which she suggests things that the more humane Judy Reyes is balking about doing (at first). This is none more the case than the scene early into the film where she approaches a guy in a bar (Bryant Carroll) “I would like to masturbate you in the bathroom” and we see them a couple of moments later where she is more interested in her instruments to collect his semen than in him. And then a few minutes after that where she returns to her apartment, feeds a pig that is wandering around, before lying on the floor to impregnate herself. It gives the film a “what the feck is going on here?” element.
From the moment it opens in the middle of an ER delivery, Birth/Rebirth is tight and urgent. The camerawork is all grim and harsh indoor lighting. It takes some time for it to click that what we have is really a Frankenstein Film, albeit updated to the era of modern medicine. Laura Moss has
clearly done her research into the medical side of things and does not stint when it comes to gory depictions of autopsies and operations.
(l to r) Marin Ireland and Judy Reyes plot Frankensteinian science
Birth/Rebirth belongs to the new 2020s movement of women-driven films and very much a film focused on women’s horror. The men in the show tend to be portrayed as jerks – Breeda Wool’s clueless husband; the co-worker (Grant Harrison) that Marin Ireland harshly dresses down for wanting time off to go to school for his child; and the dismissive coldness with which the guy in the bar is treated as having no more use than for his sperm. At the same time, it is not exactly a film embracing positive role models for women – well it is in the sense that it features strong, determined and independent women – but more a case of watching two determined women push well past all ethical boundaries.
In terms of Medical Horrors, the film has an unnerving creep factor that gets under the skin in the ways that works like Dead Ringers (1988) and Grace (2009) manage to do. You can see it in as the duo convince Breeda Wool to come in for unneeded exams, or in Judy Reyes’s visit to Breeda’s house leading to an ending that you can see coming but is horrible to watch unfold. Not to mention the flashbacks showing Marin conducting Frankensteinian experiments on the body of her mother. It all mounts to a chillingly effective film.
(Nominee for Best Actress (Marin Ireland) at this site’s Best of 2023 Awards).
