By the time that Jonathan Glazer’s Birth arrives at its shocking central scene of adult widow Anna (Nicole Kidman) and her 10-year-old admirer Sean (Cameron Bright) naked in a bathtub together, Glazer has so effectively immersed the audience in Anna’s worldview that it seems inevitable and even tenderly affecting that the two characters would end up in this position. From an outside perspective, Anna’s actions are horrifying, but for Anna, they’re an expression of pure love.
Glazer strikes a nearly impossible balance throughout Birth, taking a somber approach to an inherently silly premise and making it into a haunting meditation on grief and enduring love. Just as Anna is swept up in the idea that this young boy could be the reincarnation of her late husband, so is the viewer, going along with the absurdity thanks to Glazer’s meticulous filmmaking and Kidman’s powerful performance.
Birth opens with Anna’s unseen husband (also named Sean) expressing skepticism over reincarnation, before the camera follows him on a run in New York City’s Central Park, where he collapses and dies suddenly. Glazer never clearly shows Sean’s face, and when he cuts to the birth of a baby immediately afterward, it’s not hard to draw the connection that Anna herself will later also make. The title card comes up, and this birth is inextricably linked with Sean’s death.
Ten years later, Anna is still grieving as intensely as when Sean first died, though now engaged to another man. It’s telling that at their engagement party, Joseph (Danny Huston) tells the story of his efforts to wear Anna down as if it’s a cute romantic anecdote, when it sounds more like benign harassment. She’s finally agreed to marry him, but their relationship seems based more on mutual compromise than on genuine passion. In Birth’s only sex scene, Anna interrupts their coupling to tell Joseph about young Sean’s claim that he’s really her husband.
She laughs off that claim at first, but even in her early interactions with Sean, there’s a clear glimmer of hope that his improbable assertion could somehow be true. “Are you going to play a trick on me?” she asks with a smile when Sean barges into her mother’s birthday party and insists on talking to her. She’s just indulging the whims of a child, appeasing this stranger so that she can get back to her family. After Sean leaves, Anna and her sister Laura (Alison Elliott) laugh together over the ridiculousness of the situation.
Anna isn’t laughing for long, though, and Glazer never treats the subject as comedic. There’s pain behind all of Anna’s interactions, with Sean and with everyone else in her life, and she holds desperately to the idea that her husband could be alive. Following that first encounter, Anna and Joseph attend an orchestra concert, and Glazer keeps the camera close on Kidman’s face in an unbroken two-minute take, as Anna processes the full weight of what she’s heard from Sean. Kidman captures all of Anna’s anguish and hope without saying a word, and following that devastating moment, Anna’s resolve is clear.
Sean is eerily insistent, not only that he’s actually Anna’s husband but also that she must not marry Joseph, in a way that would seem possessive and controlling if it came from a typical adult ex-spouse. Sean knows specific intimate details about Anna’s life with her husband, but no one ever assesses whether he has the same personality. If the real Sean was like this when he was alive, then he probably wasn’t a particularly good husband.
Late in the movie, Anna’s mother Eleanor (Lauren Bacall) expresses that she never liked Sean, although she leaves the reasons unsaid. Sean’s true personality seems almost beside the point for Anna, who will accept almost anything if it means she can have some semblance of the life that was torn from her when her husband died.
Anna increasingly ignores any signs that Sean might not be telling the truth, but Glazer continues to offer hints that he may just be a misguided child. At a meeting with Anna and her family, Sean asks for apple juice when offered a drink. He and Anna have a serious discussion about their potential future as he eats ice cream. After they take a carriage ride together through Central Park, she watches him play on the monkey bars.
These sound like goofy, humorous moments, but they come across as disquieting and otherworldly, thanks to Glazer’s calculating approach and Harris Savides’ carefully composed cinematography, which captures a clinical upper-class New York City that recalls similarly unsettling movies like Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. It’s not hard to envision Anna running into Kidman’s Eyes Wide Shut character, since both exist in this same world of privileged ennui.
Sean, who enters Anna’s building because his father works there as a tutor, shatters that world, and Bright’s disturbing performance gives him the sense of a disruptive invader. That invasion is exactly what Anna needs, though, and she clings to it until it’s impossible to escape. The allure of Birth ensures that the audience clings right along with her.
“Birth” is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.
