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Of all Cronenbergs body horrors, however, the touchstone here seems to be 1988sDead Ringers, one of the directors most sophisticated and least gory, dealing with notions of duality in the story of doomed identical twin gynecologists.
Moss touches on similar ideas of yin and yang here, starting with the character of Rose (Marin Ireland), a withdrawn, socially awkward pathologist whose bizarre private life suggests she is Up To No Good, jerking off random strangers in public restrooms and saving the sperm for some obviously nefarious purpose.
Celie (Judy Reyes), meanwhile, is a sunny and popular maternity nurse who is devoted to her 6-year-old daughter Lila.
Marin Ireland and Judy Reyes in ‘birth/rebirth’Sundance Institute
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Their paths seem unlikely to connect, living, respectively, in the gloomy netherworld and bright above-ground of the same hospital, but meet they do after Lila becomes sick with a meningitis-like illness.
Before Celie can make it to ER, Lila is pronounced dead, but her mothers intuition is aroused: the precise details are sketchy, and Lilas body is missing.
Tailing Rose, Celie makes a shocking discovery Lila is not dead at all but alive and comatose in Roses apartment, where she is being kept alive by a serum based on miscarried human fetuses (which explains what Rose has been doing all this time).
This may seem like a major spoiler, butbirth/rebirthis only just getting going, and the films success depends on your willingness to suspend disbelief as to what happens next.
Eschewing the usual gothic bombast of medical horrors, Moss film becomes a kind of perverse buddy movie instead, as Celie effectively moves in with Rose to enable her.
While Rose works on her serum, revealing the roots of her obsession with regeneration after cutting off a starfishs leg as a child, Celie plays housemaid, keeping Roses fridge stocked and swiping medical supplies on an industrial scale.
But when Roses medical status changes, and she is no longer able to produce compatible fetuses, the two women are forced to look for a new match, settling on a heavily pregnant, not to mention overly trusting, local woman who falls unwittingly into their clutches.
The films absolute defiance of genre tropes is admirable but sometimes self-defeating, and the sudden lurch intoOdd Coupleterritory is yours to take or leave.
Similarly, any lurking fears that its about to become aMonkeys Paw-style warning about the ethics of messing with Gods plan ominous shots of Lilas pouty face and scenes suggesting that her behavior is becoming dangerously erratic quickly evaporate.
In this sense, the final stretch is the most satisfying of the films distinct three acts, as Celie drops the co-conspirator act and becomes an active participant in Roses crazy scheme.
Likewise, its here that some of the films more original ideas come to fore, about nature, nurture and science, not to mention the terrifying vulnerability of expectant parents.
TheSundancefestivals Midnight strand is a broad church, and in many ways the films ungainliness is part of its appeal, in the sense that one can infer its ongoing resistance to convenient genre tropes and feel reassured that aTwilight Zonetwist isnt waiting round the corner.
The two leads, likewise, counter typical casting, adding a level of realism that helps keep things on track whenever the plotting gets silly.
At these times, though, there is the sense thatbirth/rebirthmight simply be a slightly smarter TV movie from hell, and if only one lesson can be learned here, its that campy lines like Dont you walk away from me, you mad scientist princess bitch, while great, are not always helpful when trying to establish the tone of an intelligent female-fronted horror.
