The Unseen Movie Review

Birth

Jonathan “Sexy Beast” Glazer’s latest reunites modern sexy star Nicole Kidman with one of the last remaining screen sirens of the Holywood Golden Age, Lauren Bacall, after their depressingly unpleasant arthouse outing in last year’s superb Dogville. Since then, Bacall’s public statements about Kidman’s lack of star status have hit the headlines, but here, with Bacall playing Kidman’s mother, there are few signs of any off-screen animosity between the two leading ladies.

This is, like so many of her recent outings, utterly Kidman’s film. She should be careful – if she continues to play these put-upon, psychologically damaged women all the time she may end up typecasting herself as a gibbering and confused wreck. We’ve had her Oscar-winning turn as Virginia Woolfe in The Hours, her mysterious moll in Dogville and her terrified mother in The Others, a film which sounds so similar in basic plot terms to Birth that if glancing at capsule summaries it would be easy to mistake the two.

Whereas The Others saw Kidman confused and beset by apparent horrors in a relentlessly creepy psychological semi-horror while acting alongside two children, here she is confused and beset by apparent horrors in a relentlessly creepy psychological semi-horror while, erm… acting alongside a child.

Kidman is Anna, a widow finally coming to terms with her husband’s death and set to remarry. In one of those classic horror motifs, used in much-loved movies from The Exorcist and The Omen through Poltergeist and Village of the Damned, the creepiness comes in the form of a child – played by the highly talented 10-year-old Canadian, Cameron Bright. The boy demands to speak with Anna alone, only to tell her that he is the reincarnation of her dead husband and that he heartily disapproves of her fiancée.

Thankfully, however, Glazer is an astute enough director (and co-writer) not to go for a clichéd psycho-kiddie approach. This is not really a horror film at all, more a psychological exploration of bereavement. How would any of us cope if a dead loved one appeared to return, even if in an utterly different form to how we knew them? What if reincarnation did exist, and the dead could remain fully aware of their past lives? How would they cope, and how would those who once knew them and who have tried to rebuild their lives deal with it?

With such questions being posed, this is unsurprisingly not a typical Hollywood explosions and guns affair. Slow-moving but well-paced, it may well be a tad heavy for a Saturday night first date, but it deals with the issues it raises in a thought-provoking and sometimes intelligent manner which could well prompt a decent post-movie discussion if you’re out on your third or fourth. For those of us not in the dating game, it’s another chance to see Kidman do what she does so well and come out of the cinema wondering what we’d have done in her shoes. Personally I’d probably have laughed it off, patted the kid on the head and popped off down the pub, but to each their own, eh?

posted by Nosemonkey @ 12:00 AM