MIFF Session 9: BIRTH/REBIRTH

When her daughter dies in the care of a neighbour Celie is exasperated trying to search for the body. Pushing hard against red tape and smokescreens, she identifies pathologist Rose as a person of interest. Stalking her home one day, she forces her way in and finds young Lila in bed, breathing with a respirator. Her need for closure is rapidly replaced by a compulsion to bring the child back to active life. She agrees to help Rose.

Laura Moss's debut feature treads Cronenberg territory (both senior and junior) but acquits itself of the charge of theft. There are other body horror directors but the Cronenbergs will blithely enter into the fluorescently cold medical corners of it. Rose is so detached her words and deeds evoke autism. While this is not declared as such (big can of worms right there) it proves effective in distancing her from the ethics of her actions. The more fiery emotional Celie must meet Rose's toughness which brings out her character as the result of a struggle. The only thing missing from this tale of extended parenthood is sex. The closest we get is a hand-job in the gents of a pub but even that is for a clinical purpose. This is not Dead Ringers.

It is less family building, though, than the projection of life that is centre screen here. It's a twist on Frankenstein (there's even a nod to it the dialogue as the phrase "it's alive" is set in conversation) in that the can and should/ nature and artifice questions occur. The two women variously team up and bicker refulgently in service of a goal they never quite define. As they fight or plunge further into administrative and human abuse to get their project working, the revived girl stumbles from or mumbles in her bed, almost insensate. The notion of quality of life which informs so much of the debate on assisted dying is pushed down but this is diegetic, not a fault in the writing. We are witnessing the loss of sight on the target.

Moss takes us to the edge of limits on what we can see without abandoning her film. There is an abattoir's worth of gore on screen and abuse of corpses but it is done through the filter of medical professionalism (however unhippocratic) which creates just enough distance. She understands that intent is a more potent tool than explicit violence and takes on the struggle to keep us empathetic with a pair of characters we would condemn if they were on the news. 

Marin Ireland keeps her voice flat and her face plain but allows enough self-awareness through to render her both pitiable and terrifying. Judy Reyes as Celie brings a strength in crisis desperation. Young A.J. Lister as Lila has to make a lot of her grunts and near vocalisations to keep us at bay here and on the edge of our seats there as she seems to take agency. The pallet is kept laboratory  chilled and the score consists of the kind of electronic choirs that The Knife and Fever Ray made their own.We are drawn increasingly into the forbidding realm of obsession and bodily exploration that might never reach an end. That, more than the gore, gives us the horrors here.