Written by: Laura Moss & Brendan J. O’Brien
Starring: Marin Ireland, Judy Reyes, A.J. Lister, Breeda Wool, LaChanze
Rating: [2.5/5]
Losing a child ranks highly amongst the worst things a human being can experience where they have brought this being into the world, nurtured it, and lost it far too prematurely. A pain incomparable with pretty much anything else, as a child gets robbed of their future. An incalculable grief then gets met up with a wholly disturbing solution in Birth/Rebirth as a story that takes the idea of a Frankenstein monster to a whole new level.
Working as a pathologist at a hospital, Rose (Marin Ireland) does not particularly enjoy interactions with people and much prefers to keep to herself. A maternity nurse, Celie (Judy Reyes) loses her daughter to a mysterious death and while grieving Celie finds that Rose has taken the body of her daughter for her experiment in trying to raise someone from the dead, much to the shock of this mother.
When someone loses a loved one and begs and pleads for them to come back at any cost, I am pretty sure what we see transpiring in Birth/Rebirth falls into that category of things a parent would seek. Perhaps through some divine intervention, their loved one could come back to life, but having them come back through means bordering on terrifying really puts this mother to the test. It goes beyond any level of comprehension, which makes it difficult to judge much of the decision-making done by Celie when she learns what has transpired and her actions following it all sits as the fulcrum of the emotional core this film carries.
The combination of bringing this child back to life and maintaining their new life force brings together quite the odd duo of Rose and Celie. Rose carries much of the oddity in the description in having no need or want to interact with others and would prefer to spend her days doing strange experiments such as the one she does in this film. Very much the Dr. Frankenstein here but there’s something to the way she carries herself in this film that manages to build a bit of sympathy for her. Her oddities become part of a slight charm, despite the fact that she took the corpse of a child to experiment on her. Truly quite the strange person to follow around and matching that up with the grieving Celie makes for quite the duo to follow around as they continue to not only push ethical boundaries but barrel over them for this unexpected shared mission of keeping this young child alive after the resuscitation.
As much as this film wants the audience to sit in some discomfort, it pretty much treads water for the majority of its runtime. Barely delivering anything outside its strange premise, it just lives in the reprehensible actions of these two characters. It never quite moves beyond that and just feels repetitive until we barrel towards the end. This leaves large swaths of the film dragging along and not bringing anything refreshing or even worth exploring other than wondering what other reprehensible things these two will do in order to allow this experiment to continue. Makes it feel like a bit of a missed opportunity at times.
That does not take away from the fun performances given not only by Judy Reyes as the grieving mother but, in particular, Marin Ireland tasked with the difficult role of Rose. Needing to provide humanity where it seemingly did not exist, Ireland makes Rose such an oddly compelling character to follow as we try to figure out exactly what propels her as a character and these strange actions she undergoes here. For Celie, we can understand the grief and pain of a mother who would do implausible things to bring back a dead child, but Rose has something else clawing at her wanting to do this and getting to the bottom of it brings much of the intrigue where the narrative fails.
A decent premise with some shoddy execution, a good film certainly exists in Birth/Rebirth, but it does not get completely unearthed in what we receive here. Outside the central premise, this film just seeks to continually upset audience members in showing how far these two will go for this experiment, and none of it feels as if it amounts to anything particularly grand or worth the amount of time spent within this story. While the performances did their part, the story needed a bit of refinement in order to reach its full potential.
Films with Josh 
