Warning — there are spoilers for the film Birth/Rebirth in this article.
When does passion turn into a deadly obsession? How far are we willing to go to keep what we love alive? How do we treat our morality when we’re put in a situation dark enough to test it?
These are questions that the film Birth/Rebirth forces you to face as a viewer.
An imaginative femme re-telling of the horror classic, Frankenstein, this movie plays off the modern-day implications of death, birth, and the radical idea of… rebirth.
The Trauma Line
This film is pretty steeped in trauma which would make writing this essay easier, you’d think, but it’s quite difficult to go into all the nooks and crannies of trauma without spoiling the entire thing. So I’ll try my best to stay more vague in this one.
We start with a traumatic scene from the beginning as a woman is giving birth. There are voices trying to calm her down and reassure her that she’s doing great and the baby is fine. And this is true. The baby is fine. But the mother? Not so lucky. Laura Moss’s decision to throw one of the most horrific fears about birth trauma into our laps was bold but it worked. The tone has been set. Both in terms of what is to come (more and more body horror) but also a reminder that when it comes down to it, society cares more about the baby than its mother. It’s an overt nod to all those who believe women lose the right to their own bodies, their own health, and their own decisions when they carry a child inside of them. It’s an insinuation that for all the power we carry in our wombs, it’s what we are punished for, as well.
That’s just the start…
As we progress, we’re introduced to Celie (Judy Reyes), a single mother who works as a nurse in the obstetrician unit of a hospital. Even though we see she is enamored with and loves her daughter, we also see that she is struggling to make ends meet. Her attention is frayed and as little Lila tells her mommy, “You’re not paying enough attention to me.” But this isn’t the trauma. The trauma comes when she is left with a neighbor and falls ill. She quickly devolves until the neighbor has to take her to the hospital and Lila succumbs quickly to bacterial meningitis, dying before Celie can even say goodbye.
Coming off the heels of Celie’s extreme guilt (her daughter had mentioned not feeling well, but Celie was late for her shift at work and had to pass her off to the neighbor quickly), is the pain of realizing that her daughter’s body has gone missing. As a staff member of the hospital, she has a bit more knowledge than the average person about these types of things so she follows the chain of custody until she reaches Rose (Marin Ireland)—the morgue technician.
This is where the magic of Moss’s interpretation of Frankenstein shines. Yes, it’s weird and freaky and hard to watch. But it’s also fascinating, beguiling and interesting. Rose, you see, has been working on a secret project for most of her life — trying to reanimate the recently deceased. Up until Lila’s death, Rose hadn’t found a suitable human with the right DNA sequencing. So Rose, cold, calculating, determined steals Lila’s body and begins her experiment to bring her back to life.
Let’s cut back to Celie, who at this point is suspicious of Rose after their confrontation around her daughter’s missing body. Celie follows Rose back to her apartment and bursts in to find Lila hooked up to monitors and machines. She is not conscious… but she is also not dead.
Okay — let’s pause and take a breath here because this is already a shit ton of trauma to process.
A woman has died in childbirth (this will come back around in the end)
Celie’s daughter has died suddenly
Rose has stolen her daughter’s body
Celie finds Lila in Rose’s apartment not dead, but not quite alive either
Celie is of course traumatized by this and in disbelief. I mean, wouldn’t you be the same? It’s not until a fat, jolly pig walks across her path and is told, “That’s Muriel, she died two months ago,” that Celie begins to understand the impact of what Rose has done.
This is where the story could have splintered every which way. But the surprising path Moss has us follow is the unlikely friendship (partnership) that forms between Celie and Rose.
For Celie, this appears to be her once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a second chance with her daughter. For Rose, she is one step closer to the pinnacle of her experiments — a successful re-animation that no one will be able to deny.
So they march into the horror together, facing each grisly obstacle as it comes.
For Rose (played to perfection by Marin Ireland), some of the atrocities needed to ensure the experiment’s success put the viewer in a rather precarious spot. For us, we see the double horror in it all — not only the actions that Rose takes but the ways in which she performs all of this in a cold and clinical way. What would feel immensely traumatic in another film is nothing short of a “means to an end” in this film (like Rose self-impregnating herself and then forcing her own abortion to use the cells and tissue from the fetus).
While Rose has no intention of becoming a mother to any of the fetuses, there is something to be said about the trauma of purposely and repeatedly sacrificing her body, her hormones, and her health to keep the experiment alive. The secondary trauma (and another obstacle she and Celie must face) is when she can no longer get pregnant due to an infection.
Now, Celie and Rose must find another way to get the materials for the serum… unfortunately, that means finding someone else who has the proper DNA and pregnancy hormones to steal from. The two of them are now plunged into inflicting trauma on an unsuspecting mother all to keep a child (who may not even remain child-like) from re-dying.
All the while, Celie and Rose realize that Lila's coming back to life may not actually be a good thing. She is nonverbal, angry, and un-child-like. She murders Muriel the pig without blinking an eye and it finally hits Celie and Rose that they may have brought back a corpse back to life, but it certainly isn’t Lila any longer.
This is the point at which some filmmakers would end the story. But not Moss. She takes it one step further. Instead of Celie and Rose calling it quits, they double down. They take horrific measures to ensure that they can get the fetal material they need for another revival. Including purposely messing up test results to keep a mother coming back in to get labs drawn until the fateful delivery where her baby lives and she does not.
The Storytelling
This film is such a prime example of the horror genre exploring some of the most potent, controversial issues we face today. As I’m always preaching — horror is metaphor. And in this film, it’s all over the damn place. Body horror in particular is a great gateway to this exploration.
In case you don’t know, “body horror” or “biological horror” is a subgenre of horror that intentionally showcases grotesque or physically disturbing violations of the human body or any other creature¹.
This film features many different angles and perspectives on body horror. From the obvious metaphors of menstrual, pregnancy, and miscarriage blood, to the “farming” of other bodies for the right materials to reanimate the corpses.
Of course, Lila herself is a product of body horror. First through her bacterial meningitis to her corpse being used as an experiment.
Because body horror is such a visceral and visual way to tell a story, it often needs to be offset by a different kind of terror on the other side. We can only take SO much visual horror before we need to turn away or turn it off. Laura Moss does this beautifully as we get terror-laden scenes simply because of the somber coloring and audible soundtrack. Other times, it’s the wisely placed comic relief.
I think what Laura Moss did with Birth/Rebirth is something that a lot of filmmakers, storytellers, and horror aficionados have tried and failed to do — which is to modernize Frankenstein. Actually, it’s more than that. It’s that Moss was able to create a modern and terrifying look at women, motherhood, and their role in life outside the confines of those labels.
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