Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Birth/Rebirth’ on Hulu, a Frankensteiny Horror-Thriller Rooted in Feminine Dread

Laura Moss isn’t shy about revealing the inspiration of their directorial debut Birth/Rebirth (now streaming on Hulu): Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The first time director reframed the mad-scientist-as-reanimator concept within the fraught complexities of modern femininity and motherhood, and came up with a creepy, existential heavy-thinker rife with viscous dollops of body horror. The film earned three Independent Spirit Awards, for screenplay, best lead performance for Judy Reyes and the Someone To Watch award for Moss – all pretty well-deserved, as I’m about to get into here. 

BIRTH/REBIRTH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Rose (Malin Ireland) is a cold person. I imagine you have to be able to compartmentalize real hard in order to be a pathologist, performing autopsies in the hospital basement, but this lady is a step or 10 beyond that. She treats a friendly coworker with brutal chilliness when he asks to leave early to tend to his sick child – could be worse. She removes the placenta from a dead woman and… packs it in a suitcase? Definitely worse. She goes to the bar and when a lump of idiot hits on her, she stares him down and flatly says, “I’d like to masturbate you in the bathroom” – and then takes his semen home and inseminates herself with it. She has a chest freezer full of blood bags. She has a pet pig named Muriel, and if you think this humanizes her, well, you don’t know the origin of the pig yet. Everything about her screams sociopath.

Celie (Reyes) is just the opposite. She’s a smiley maternity nurse who’s been in the birthing stirrups before and empathizes with their pain. “Think of it as taking a really big shit,” she whispers in the ear of a struggling almost-mom, and she laughs and gives a big push and it doesn’t seem so bad anymore. She picks up her six-year-old daughter Lila (A.J. Lister) and mutual affection spills over like the fizz of an overfilled soda cup. Single motherhood isn’t easy for anyone, and Celie isn’t an exception to that, but you get the sense she wouldn’t want it any other way. Then she wakes up late. Lila isn’t feeling well. Celie rushes her screaming and crying to the sitter. Another long shift. She can’t take calls from the sitter because, insult on top of stress, her phone fell in the toilet. Celie gets back and finds a note – had to rush Lila to the hospital. The kid’s gone before Celie gets there. Bacterial meningitis. The look of emptiness on Celie’s face is devastating. Devastating.

Lila’s body ends up on Rose’s slab, and then in her suitcase. Celie drops by to see her child and learns that Rose isn’t big on eye contact. Rose sends Celie to the medical examiner but they don’t have a record of Lila being there. Curious. What with one thing and another, Celie ends up rapping on Rose’s door and entering the apartment and walking past the pig and the freezer and finding Lila in the bed, alive, attached to a ventilator and IV bag and all the monitors, prompting the following exchange:

“Your daughter’s genetic profile made her a perfect candidate for an experimental treatment I’ve been working on.” 

“For meningitis?”

“For death.” 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Poor Things covered similar material from a more, shall we say, fanciful angle.

Performance Worth Watching: Once this plot cracks wide open, Ireland and Reyes prove to be quite the on-screen duo. 

Memorable Dialogue: “At least you didn’t do anything unethical, like eating a ham sandwich!” – Celie finds it curious that Rose is a mad scientist who’s also a vegetarian

Sex and Skin: A couple moments of brief female nudity.

Our Take: I promise I’m not revealing too much by saying that Rose and Celie, after the aforementioned revelation that the girl has been brought back from the dead, develop a fascinating relationship that constitutes the core themes of Birth/Rebirth: A dead-serious assertion of mothers-will-do-anything-for-their-children tropes. And a slyly comic display of odd-couple dynamics in which our two principals, united by their deeply amoral “project,” move in with each other and not only represent two ideological extremes – cold science and unfettered emotion – but also coordinate schedules and snipe at each other’s personality peccadilloes like an old couple. Their moral compromises are horrifying, their feminist assertions are intriguing and their honey-I’m-home/what’s-for-dinner routines are amusing, especially when couched within such a disturbing premise.

Moss shows clear vision and intent, using drab lighting and tight interior spaces to create a sense of suffocating tension: What’s the endgame for this little resurrection endeavor? Neither character can see past their own noses – Rose is myopic in her quest to use science to achieve the unfathomable, and Celie is so grief-stricken she seems to be repressing any ethical misgivings she almost certainly entertains in order to be reunited with her daughter. Moss stubbornly avoids any rote sci-fi or horror flourishes, maintaining a sense of realism that, for the most part, maintains our suspension of disbelief; she doesn’t get lost in any details of Rose’s research (I think it has something to do with stem cells), but retains a sense of scientific plausibility that staves off our skepticism and keeps us enthralled in the moment.

Women who’ve been through the rigors of pregnancy – or any trip to the gynecologist, for that matter – likely will feel an added layer of dread here, as Moss roots the story’s most unsettling elements firmly within the modern feminine experience. The body horror here isn’t as memorably grotesque as you’d find in a Cronenberg film (David or Brandon, take your pick); it functions not for shock value, but to take an everyday occurrence in a gyno clinic and stretch it to horrifyingly plausible extremes. Even more unsettling is how the women in this movie, despite being remarkably similar in their motherly instincts, are doing such horrifying things to each other.

Our Call: Birth/Rebirth is a provocative and disturbing thriller, sharply and thoughtfully executed by Moss. Someone give this director a blank check, please. STREAM IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.