Sundance review: BIRTH/REBIRTH delivers incredibly dark horror

I was really excited to get into this horror movie Birth/rebirth, mostly because I knew it had something to do with reanimation, and I’m a big fan of the campy 1985 classic Re-Animators. That said, I was completely unprepared for how brutal things were going to be. A word of warning: this film is not for the squeamish.

The film focuses primarily on two women: a pathologist, Rose (Marine Ireland), who spends her free time doing an excellent Dr. Frankenstein impersonation, and a maternity nurse, Celie (Judy Reyes), a single mother doing her best. After the unexpected death of Celie’s daughter, Rose takes the opportunity to try to bring her back to life.

Upon learning that her daughter’s body was essentially stolen by this mad scientist, Celie is first horrified and then fascinated when the experiment seems to work. As the women begin working together to care for the resuscitated baby, we see their unique approaches to medicine and science; the two characters couldn’t be more different and play so well with each other, it’s actually pretty sweet.

The pressure mounts as it gets harder and harder for women to procure things like stem cells and bone marrow to use to keep the girl alive, and the ethics of how they’re procured only get darker.

As you can probably imagine, there is a quantity of blood, needles and medical procedures in this film. While light on the jump scares, there’s plenty of Cronenberg-style body horror to keep you on the edge of your seat (or face buried in your hands).

Sundance’s description reads:

Rose is a pathologist who prefers working with corpses to social interaction. She also has an obsession: reanimating the dead. Celie is a maternity nurse who has built her life around her lively and chatty 6-year-old daughter, Lila. One unfortunate day, their worlds collide. The two women and the young girl embark on a dark path of no return where they will be forced to confront how far they are willing to go to protect what they hold most dear.

Laura Moss and Brendan J. O’Brien’s fiendishly perceptive screenplay reimagines a classic horror myth with an understanding so comprehensive and contemporary that it becomes something exciting, terrifying, and singularly new. They rooted this chilling fantasy in the complex psychologies of its protagonists, played all too convincingly by Judy Reyes, Marin Ireland and AJ Lister. This stunning directorial debut from Laura Moss is a wonderfully twisted story that is sure to be one of the big brain shocks of the year.