Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
It took Anna 10 years to recover from the death of her husband, Sean, but now she's on the verge of marrying her boyfriend, Joseph, and finally moving on. However, on the night of her engagement party, a young boy named Sean turns up, saying he is her dead husband reincarnated. At first she ignores the child, but his knowledge of her former husband's life is uncanny, leading her to believe that he might be telling the truth.
Birth is a tonally austere, hypnotic film elevated by Nicole Kidman's near-wordless performance and Alexandre Desplat's score. Jonathan Glazer's cinematography is genuinely exceptional — the long, unbroken close-up on Kidman at the opera is one of the decade's great shots. The acting across the board is committed and restrained. However, the plot, while intriguing in premise, meanders and struggles to fully justify its central conceit, leaving many threads unresolved. The ending is the film's weakest point: it deflates rather than resolves, opting for a vague emotional collapse that feels more frustrating than ambiguous. Novelty is above average but not exceptional — the reincarnation premise in a realistic New York setting is distinctive in execution but not wholly singular as a concept.