Wealthy New York widow Anna (a miraculous Nicole Kidman) accepts the marriage proposal of Joseph (Danny Huston), whom she doesn’t particularly love (not that it deters him), years after the sudden death of her husband, a man she married 30 times in 30 days. A ten-year-old boy (a convincing Cameron Bright) arrives at the engagement party to change everything, claiming to be the reincarnation of her dead husband Sean. 

Largely ridiculed upon its release, Jonathan Glazer’s still-controversial Birth has always had the hallmarks of a cult classic: fervent defenders, frequently indefensible female characters, a star-studded cast, and a reclusive auteur. Birth is a meditation on grief and its aftershocks. What is the film’s biggest tragedy? The control given up by daring to love anyone at all. 

Astutely shot by Harris Savides, the film is seductively gloomy —  tastefully grainy, assertively underexposed, and largely lit overhead. Muslin was used for light diffusion, as though the film itself is swathed in a burial shroud. This is not to say the film isn’t pleasurable: Lauren Bacall delivers a memorable zinger in her distinctive rasp, Anne Heche gives the performance of her life, and the magisterial score from Alexandre Desplat leads you on a waltz straight into the abyss. 

Still, you must believe in the film’s improbable premise — much like Anna. You must also accept the inevitable (it will likely make you sad). It might even anger you. What would a satisfying conclusion be? Anna is willing to risk almost everything to find out. 

As fantasy and drama, Birth is deathly serious and strikingly original, a 21st century Luis Buñuel exercise co-written by his long-time collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière. Its thematic nature is thorny and uncomfortable; its $20 million budget now seems practically impossible. Nicole Kidman, with a Rosemary’s Baby pixie cut and Mia Farrow-like obedient rich-girl naïveté, delivers perhaps her bravest performance. To her, Sean’s reentrance is a balm after a decade of suffering, no matter how wrong or how unlikely it really is. Sequestered in her penthouse apartment like a princess in a fairytale, she draws us into her magical thinking, and it’s difficult not to follow her.
 

35mm from Park Circus
 

Preceded by: Nicole Kidman trailer reel – 10 min – 35mm