⭐⭐⭐⭐
In Laura Moss’s smart medical chiller, a single mother and a childless morgue technician are bound together by their relationship to a little girl they have reanimated from the dead.
“You mad doctor princess bitch!”
When a nurse’s daughter dies of meningitis; the body goes “missing” from the morgue. What is the morgue technician up to? This is a smart emotionally intelligent script, gnarly medical imagery & two phenomenal leads in Judy Reyes and (in particular) Marin Ireland.
These two women, so different to each other, do start to build a tenuous friendship. But this is a cousin of such classic medical ressurection horror as Frankenstein, and there never was a Frankenstein movie that ended with hugs and kisses. No, this is a cautionary tale about the dangers of obsession, and medical hubris run amok.
Writer-director Moss is clearly one to watch. It’s also worth pointing out that Birth/Rebirth benefits from a female cinematographer, Chananun Chotrungroj. (Cinematography is still the most male-dominated of the major filmmaking professions.)
Birth/Rebirth is an excellent, grounded, medical horror that’s already looking like one of the best of the year.
Birth/Rebirth played at Overlook Film Festival in advance of a wider release later in 2023.
Whitlock&Pope 