Birth

Ten years after the death of her beloved husband Sean, Upper Manhattanite Anna (Nicole Kidman) is engaged again. However, at a party to announce her engagement to solid, understanding Joseph (Danny Huston), a young boy (Cameron Bright) appears who claims to be Sean's reincarnated spirit. This might sound like a hokey supernatural drama, but Jonathan Glazer has created a thoughtful mood piece and managed to extract one of Kidman's finest performances.

Sean's arrival at first extracts only laughs from Anna, but when Sean becomes more insistent in his advances, a glimmer of uncertainty opens up within Anna that expands as it becomes apparent that his knowledge of her dead husband extends far beyond the trivial and into the thoughts, feelings and secrets they shared when they were together. Or does it? Both Glazer's script and Kidman's careful performance are attuned to the possibility that she is quite capable of fantasising the boy into something he is not. Indeed, a plot twist towards the end of the film would seem to suggest that their relationship might not have been as perfect as Anna remembers it. This is reflected in the ickier implications of Anna's relationship with Sean, which rears its ugly head several times but is ultimately something which Anna is unable to meet head-on.

Glazer's evocation of mood here is excellent, bolstered by an appropriately eerie score from Alexandre Desplat. The increasingly disturbed nature of this central relationship becomes quite a bug to bare within her privileged family; the arrival of an eerily self-possessed child from downtown into their upper middle-class world seems to be more of a problem than Anna's possibly paedophilic tendencies. It is unfortunate that the film is forced to show its hand at the end of the film, which spoils some of Glazer's subtler work earlier on. However, Birth is definitely a worthwhile watch and Kidman has never been better.