Over the last hundred years or so, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has grown comfortable in the tradition of cultural warhorses. As with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories or Bram Stoker’s Dracula, you know half the particulars of Frankenstein through osmosis: A scientist brings a composite of corpses back to life, questioning his newfound fatherhood while the creature runs amok. With every telling across various mediums, the creature’s escapades grow in prominence and decline in nuance while the transgression of stealing power from God recedes into the background. Director and co-writer Laura Moss’s Birth/Rebirth serves as a perverse correction, then, recalibrating decades of dilution to reemphasize the moral weight and emotional anguish at the heart of Shelley’s novel.
Imagine Victor Frankenstein and one of the assistants that pop culture has subsequently granted him over the years—whether it’s Fritz, Igor, or another—as single mothers caught in a precarious coparenting situation and you’ve got an idea of how boldly Moss and co-writer Brendan J. O’Brien have brought Frankenstein into the present day. Dr. Rose Casper (Marin Ireland) is a morgue technician who steals body parts, and who inseminates herself artificially so as to harvest fetuses for ongoing research in cellular regeneration. Rose shares with Shelley’s eponymous protagonist a determination to cheat the death that surrounds her, though she also appears determined to leech mothering of its, well, maternal qualities.
For Rose, sexual contact appears to be a means to end—more fetuses—which are in turn a means to more genetic material for her experiments. Rose is coded as being on the spectrum, or, in pop-cultural terms, she’s Dr. House, a medical genius who can only grapple with humanity when it’s relegated to data. She wants control over life without submitting to its messiness, a notion which may have resonated for Shelley herself given her struggle with miscarriages.
Rose’s Igor—or Dr. Watson, or Dr. Wilson—is Celi (Judy Reyes), a nurse working in the same Bronx hospital as Rose who serves as a foil and contrast to the doctor. Celi aides with child births, dealing in life while Rose trades in death, and her warm presence suggests a level of empathy that’s far beyond Rose’s understanding. Their conflicting philosophies are soon brought into collision when Celi’s six-year-old daughter, Lila (A.J. Lister), dies of bacterial meningitis. Rose steals the corpse and reanimates it in her cramped apartment with her secret process, which Moss, wisely, doesn’t elucidate. Celi discovers Rose’s transgression and they enter into an uneasy bond in order to keep the barely conscious Celi alive.
It may seem as if I’m cavalierly parsing through unusually macabre details. One presumes that watching sequences in which a woman unfeelingly aborts her fetuses and tears placentas out of corpses aren’t on many filmgoers’ bingo cards, and it’s this pervasive and casual sense of extremity that will prove to be the dividing line between admirers and detractors of the film.
Celi’s reaction to seeing Lila breathing on a stretcher in Rose’s apartment is a particular make-or-break moment for the audience. Moss doesn’t conventionally codify Celi’s grief with weeping and hand-wringing; the woman is gratified to see that there’s a second chance for her child and she “goes with it.” The experiment becomes for Celi what it is for Rose: an attempt to quantify unquantifiable emotions. This concept is no more insane than the notion of parents bringing a child back from the dead with a monkey’s paw or a trip to a pet cemetery, but Birth/Rebirth’s realistic, even drab setting brings the wildness of the concept into stark relief.
Moss filters Birth/Rebirth through Rose’s sensibility so completely that it would be tempting to read the film as a cold and tasteless puncturing of taboos. We’re used to horror films running at a higher temperature. Think of the pathos of Boris Karloff’s performances in James Whale’s Frankenstein films, or of the melodramatic emotion that drives most narratives centered around mad scientists. Even the often clammy, intellectual David Cronenberg worked himself up to operatic emotional heights with his contribution to this subgenre, The Fly. Moss refuses to give the audience such satisfactions, doubling down on Rose’s notion of cheating death as another project to be completed. She fully confronts Rose’s discomfort with her body, with her womanliness, which rhymes with Celi’s inability to come to grips with her daughter’s death. Moss’s willingness to accept her characters as they are is disturbing and, strangely, humanistic.
Birth/Bebirth feels “wrong” in the manner of horror cinema that manages to viscerally tap into uncomfortable human experience and emotions. Moss proffers a pointed riff on the anxieties over stem cell research and technology that allows for fatherless children. Wild images abound almost subliminally in a grungy, lived-in atmosphere. The sight of fetuses in a jar in a kitchen are casually horrible, particularly given the knowledge that Rose wrested them from her body with the attitude that one might reserve for dealing with a bunion. Nothing is sacred, as Moss allows us to reacquaint ourselves with the sense of sacrilege that’s evident in Frankenstein, even in secular culture. If Moss were to ever editorialize, allowing, say, an audience surrogate to pronounce Rose and Celi’s plans to be deranged, the spell would be broken and we’d be returned to the realm of the conventional horror film with overt villains. Instead, Moss follows two tortured characters down a pragmatic road to hell, understanding that their dissociation can be the foundation for either medical breakthroughs or profound callousness.
Horror films have conditioned viewers to wait for Lila to rise from her stretcher and wreak havoc, and our expectation of such events reveals our comfort with monsters, who deflect from the blame that people share in brutality. With one exception, a rare “off” note involving a cute little pig, it’s Rose and Celi who commit the atrocities depicted in the film. The monster movie we keep anticipating has been happening all along, hidden in plain sight. Birth/Rebirth ends with its most agonizing action: a shot of Rose and Celi, from the point of view of someone or something that’s being forced to draw breath yet again whether it wishes to or not. Seeking to transcend their bodies, these women have trapped another entity in its own.
Since 2001, we've brought you uncompromising, candid takes on the world of film, music, television, video games, theater, and more. Independently owned and operated publications like Slant have been hit hard in recent years, but we’re committed to keeping our content free and accessible—meaning no paywalls or fees.
If you like what we do, please consider subscribing to our Patreon or making a donation.
