With birth/rebirth screening at Griffith College Dublin as part of Imbolg: Women Who Terrify Film Festival, our in house horror expert Conor Bryce takes a look at what makes it so gripping.
There’s a particular flavour of horror that doesn’t bother with creaky doors or howling wind, because it understands that the most unsettling sounds are often the subtlest. A hospital monitor’s steady beep when you’re anticipating a flatline. The crack in a parent’s voice when they’re trying to keep it together. birth/rebirth, director Laura Moss’ sharp, unnerving debut, operates in this space. Part medical thriller, part grief-soaked character study, it’s a Frankenstein redux where the monster isn’t assembled from corpses, but from the uneasy alliance of one woman’s obsessive quest to eliminate dependence, and another’s refusal to let go of it.
This is a movie about bodies, of course – who owns them, who fixes them, who decides when they’re finished. It’s also a movie about love when it refuses to accept limits, and science when it ignores consequence. It’s a compelling, unsentimental study of these similarly obsessive acts, and the spiritual and ethical objections we’re willing to ignore when they collide head-on.
birth/rebirth is a tale of two women. Rose (Marin Ireland) is a forensic pathologist with the social warmth of one of her stainless-steel trays. She has no visible relationships, no past she’s willing to discuss…and no problem undertaking a secret project to resurrect the dead. Celie (Judy Reyes) is a maternity nurse at the same hospital – warm, practical and devoted to Lila, her young daughter. When Lila dies suddenly (a nightmare scenario that, importantly, happens when Celie isn’t there to say goodbye), the women cross paths. Rose sees Lila as a perfect test subject, and in an escalating pact, Celie does what’s necessary to aid her quest to cheat death.
Early on, Moss and co-writer Brendan J. O’Brien make three excellent choices: no overexplaining, no overreliance on the grand spectacle of reanimation, and realism at the forefront. Tension is found in samples being smuggled, bodies being moved, lies being told. Rose’s laboratory isn’t a gothic castle or a Saw-like dungeon of torture; it’s a sterile, professional workplace that doesn’t draw attention. Commentary is found in the politics of the spaces the women move in – who has access, who gets trusted, who gets monitored, and how these all shape the decisions being made. Similarly, Celie isn’t written as an unrealistic, sainted mother. She’s practical and compassionate, but can be sharp, sometimes prickly. When she discovers her daughter is alive, she doesn’t lapse into hysterics – she asks what’s needed, and leaps into action.
Judy Reyes gives one of the best, most grounded performances I’ve seen in recent horror. Early on, we see her Celie in the rhythms of daily life; deftly managing both labouring mothers and authority figures, she advocates for those who are ignored, and is fiercely protective of her child. Then tragedy arrives, and she becomes someone who can do terrible things with a steady hand, because she’s already lived through the worst thing possible. It would have been easy for her arc to descend into arch-villainy in the name of love. Instead, it’s a study of how trauma charges us. It’s not relief she feels when she sees a living, breathing Lila. It’s vigilance. She may balk and scoff with wide-eyed bewilderment at Rose’s frank explanation of what needs to be done (scenes where the movie gives us some much-needed, albeit pitch-black, humour), but she still does it, without flinching. Her daughter is alive again, and that’s all – that’s all – that matters.
Marin Ireland, meanwhile, makes Rose fascinating because she refuses easy, lazy categorisation. The ‘cold woman of science’ trope was right there, overused in the genre, from Nurse Ratched to Prometheus’ Elizabeth Shaw. Her Rose is so much more. Yes, she’s emotionally guarded, socially inelegant (an early encounter in a bar is both excruciatingly awkward and, again, bleakly funny). Yes, she’s permanently calculating if anyone is peering too closely at her overworked, bloodshot eyes. But the film also hints – without leaning into sympathy – that Rose’s detachment is for her own survival. Perhaps due to a traumatic loss revealed late in the movie, she treats bodies as test matter…because treating them as people just might break her. Ireland plays her tight, wary, always ready to retreat behind procedure. But crucially, she never makes Rose ‘quirky’. The character doesn’t veer into eccentric genius territory. She’s a person who chooses obsession, because she can’t survive attachment.
The film’s handling of Lila is another successful balancing act. She’s neither monster nor miracle; never reduced to a creepy kid prop or an angelic victim. Her death is ugly, obvious, leaving her bloodied and raw. Her resurrection is both eerie and heartbreaking because, along with her unprecedented existence, she’s still a child – omnipresent, needy, unpredictable. Her permanent state of confusion and loss of memory – whether from the virus or from ‘coming back’ is never made clear – are a constant reminder that being alive is not the same as being allowed to live on your own terms, that old Frankenstein conundrum.
Importantly though, despite the clear lineage tracing back to Mary Shelley’s magnum opus, Moss avoids clumsy metaphor and easy shorthand. While it’s tempting to read Lila’s resurrection as an allegory for reproductive politics, medical exploitation, or the commodification of bodies, birth/rebirth resists being pinned to a single issue. It’s messier than that, and all the more brilliant for it. It understands that ethical decisions rarely arrive as clear, easily defined dilemmas. It also refuses to champion either woman’s approach – Celie and Rose have equally distorted responses to creation and loss.
After reanimation, Lila’s bond to Celie starts to unravel. The moments between mother and daughter where the child is able to briefly recall her past life, before losing her grasp, are devastating. Lila’s later confusion about which woman is her mother – the one offering love and memory or the one literally keeping her body alive – is even worse. Be warned, there are zero punches pulled for Celie, or for us. For me, this was the movie at its cruellest, its sharpest, its most profound. Lila’s uncertainty exposes the cost of the bargain at its centre. Resurrection doesn’t just alter the body. It fundamentally affects everything and everyone in its orbit.
birth/rebirth feels both classical and subversive. Yes, its DNA traces back through body horror landmarks, but it’s distinctly contemporary, exploring the female experience without turning into a lecture or slogan. It trusts us to connect the dots, to wrestle with discomfort, to accept the grey areas. It unfolds as a paradoxically cold and intimate fable where science and love collapse into one another, revealing how decisions made in the grip of a complete, blinding sadness can transform acts of healing into acts of harm. It doesn’t argue that death is good. It argues that refusing death can be worse.
When asked which of his books scared him the most, Stephen King (that fine purveyor of creaky doors and howling winds) replied, “Pet Sematary is the one I put away in a drawer, thinking I had finally gone too far.” That novel’s premise of a parent’s loss superseding all ethical and spiritual considerations can be felt echoing around birth/rebirth. So too can its core message and best-remembered proclamation. “Perhaps ‘sometimes dead is better’ is grief’s last lesson,” King mused. And if grief is love persevering, perhaps resurrection is loss prolonged.
birth/rebirth screens at Griffith College Dublin on 31st January (tickets), introduced by Laura Moss who'll be also be giving a Q&A ahead of the event (tickets).
