Birth/Rebirth

What if the monster was someone Frankenstein loved? This is the conundrum posed by Laura Moss’ feature debut. A psychological horror film that re-envisions the maternal desire to create life, BIRTH/REBIRTH centres on the fraught relationship between Rose (Marin Ireland), a brusque, unemotional scientist, and Celie (Judy Reyes), a nurse who has just lost her seven-year-old daughter (A. J. Lister) to bacterial meningitis. Rose discovers that the dead girl has the perfect blood type to allow her to realise her dream of reversing death. Eventually, science and emotion come into conflict; the experiment begins to fail, but Celie will not lose her daughter again. Cold rationality and passionate attachment are neatly divided between BIRTH/REBIRTH’s two main characters, but eventually these positions begin to evolve and even switch. Moss makes the unexpected move of combining Cronenbergian body-horror with a tragic mother/daughter narrative, locating the overlap between a woman’s absolute love for her child and the almost Faustian quest for knowledge. BIRTH/REBIRTH ofers a scenario in which the emotional stakes and the ethical quandaries could not be greater. (Michael Sicinski)

Laura Moss: FRY DAY (2017, K)