Birth: Movie & DVD Review (2004)

(Originally published 2004)

The provocative, controversial mystery "Birth" stars Nicole Kidman as Anna, a woman who falls in love with 10-year-old Sean (Cameron Bright), a precocious boy who claims he is her deceased husband, also named Sean.

In the film's beautifully shot opening, in which the camera remains trained on Anna's husband as he jogs through the snow-covered paths of Central Park, we see the moment he drops dead beneath a footbridge 10 years before.

Now, in spite of the passing of a decade and the fact that Anna is on the verge of starting a new life with her fiancé, Joseph (Danny Huston, John Huston's son), she still is vulnerable, still in love with her dead husband, still not quite ready to marry, but urged to do so by her family, which believes she needs to get over Sean and move on with her life.

What they can't comprehend is the depth of Anna's grief. And so, when this young Sean turns up at the family's Upper East Side apartment with the quiet insistence that he is her Sean, the air is sucked out of the room. "You're my wife," he says to Anna, while her family looks on. "I'm Sean."

As absurd as it sounds, it turns out that this nervy kid has the goods to back up his claim. Calmly, he reveals information that only he and Anna could know, such private details as the day he and Anna had sex on the sofa on which her chilly mother, Eleanor (Lauren Bacall), now sits. Other details follow, all of them accurate, all of them met with an initial air of bemusement before annoyance, anger and then fear take root.

With the exception of Anna, who sports the very sort of haircut Mia Farrow wore in "Rosemary's Baby," what nobody here wants to believe is the possibility that the truth is standing before them - this Sean is that Sean. If it weren't, then how could this odd little boy know what he knows? Is it reincarnation that brought him here? Stranger things have happened in New York.

As directed with great skill by Jonathan Glazer ("Sexy Beast") from a script he co-wrote with Jean-Claude Carriere and Milo Addica, "Birth" is a creepy, well-acted examination of how grief can give itself over to irrationality.

It pushes its share of buttons - and then pushes a few more - in how close Anna comes to feel for young Sean. Still, if you are to believe what she believes, and that a sort of madness has crept into her soul, the scenes that feature Anna bathing with Sean, and then kissing him romantically, are inevitable extensions of that madness.

Grade: B+