The new horror film, birth/rebirth, directed by Laura Moss, received acclaim when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival earlier in the year, and now audiences will get to see the disturbing horror that's been a hit with critics. The film explores the darker sides of child-rearing with a twisted and queasily clinical approach. Marin Ireland plays a pathologist named Rose, who becomes obsessed with using science to bring a dead child back to life. The film explores the themes of birth, death, and the way beyond. The Hollywood Reporter writes that birth/rebirth is not for the faint of heart and takes cues from classic horror films such as Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator, Dracula, and Frankenstein in its grisly portrayal of two women who resurrect a little girl's corpse in the name of science and love. Check out the trailer below:
The story begins with a painful labor scene in which a midwife, Celie (Judy Reyes), cannot save the life of a first-time mother's child. The child's corpse ends up in the pathology lab, where the obsessive and prickly Rose is tasked with cleaning up the mess.
Rose is a woman who prefers dissecting bodies over talking to actual living people, but there's more to her than just her icy antisocial behavior. She's up to some strange things in the lab, taking home human tissue samples and other specimens, which she uses to concoct mixtures that she then injects into her pet pig. When Celie's six-year-old daughter, Lila, contracts a fatal case of bacterial meningitis, Rose sees an opportunity to take her experiments to the next level. She convinces Celie to let her use Lila's corpse for her twisted experiments, promising to bring the girl back to life.
Marin Ireland has had notable roles in shows such as Homeland, The Blacklist, and Sneaky Pete and films such as 28 Hotel Rooms and Killing Them Softly. She garnered a Critics' Choice Television Award nomination for her role in The Blacklist.
Birth/Rebirth is a Metaphor for Women’s Physical Transformations
While birth/rebirth is a horror film, it is also a twisted metaphor for motherhood. The film's gruesome portrayal of the medical procedures and transformations that female bodies undergo during pregnancy is intended to channel the loss that women can experience afterward.
The film uses the placenta, plasma, and other biological materials to keep the child's corpse alive. This leads to increasingly desperate and gruesome measures, as Rose and Celie resort to stealing samples from pregnant patients in the hospital. You can read director Laura Moss' statement on the film below:
I remember the impact Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein had on me when I first read it as a pre-teen. I was delighted, not only by the material, but by the fact that it was written by a woman from the Victorian era, and it wasn’t about manners, or marriage, but about elemental questions of life and legacy.
As I grew older and wrestled with the life-creating capabilities of my own body, I thought of Shelley, who suffered miscarriages and grappled with her body’s mutiny. Who lost the love of her life, and faced so much grief, and the finality of death.
This film has been gestating within me for a long time, and when it finally came out as a screenplay in my thirties, it was infused with the anxieties of my particular stage of life. The fear of the transformational nature of giving birth, of a potential loss of identity, led me to craft a story of two very different mothers.
Rose and Celie, the dual protagonists of this film, represent two different expressions of motherhood and the drive to imbue life with meaning. Celie has embraced her identity as a biological mother. Rose, obsessed with creating life with her mind, tries to build a wall between her intellect and the natural processes of her body. Over the course of the film, the polarities of these women reverse, and as they bond, we start to notice their similarities as well as their differences.
When I first read Frankenstein, it kicked open a door in my brain. With birth/rebirth, I tried to harness that electric feeling into something personal and visceral. I am so excited to share this baby with you.
birth/rebirth will open exclusively in theaters on Aug. 18th before eventually finding its streaming home on Shudder.