In the opening scene the audience gets to follow a jogger, whose identity remains a secret, as the individual has a hood covering the head.  The camera pursues the jogger from a high rear angle while moving along a snow-covered path.  Simultaneously a playfully angelic tune accompanies this short venture, which suggests that someone, maybe an angel, is watching over the jogger.  When the jogger enters a tunnel, he stops, places his hands on his knees while falling to the ground.  Consequently, the camera zooms out from the tunnel followed by a jump cut where an infant is undergoes a water birth.  All of these scenes suggest a cyclical pattern where death leads to birth, as the water birth scene offers additional symbolic value of rejuvenation.

Two years later, Anna (Nicole Kidman) finds herself getting married to Joseph (Danny Huston), as she seems to have overcome the grief of loosing her husband.  However, a young boy appears unannounced at Anna's mother’s birthday party and tells Anna that he is Sean, her late husband.  Initially, Anna waives it off as a cruel hoax, but when the boy begins to say things that only Sean could have known she stumbles backwards into an emotional state of confusion.  Bewildered Anna begins to ponder what if it really is Sean, as she slowly begins to regress into the grief she felt when Sean died.  However, she sidesteps the misery by beginning to embrace the 10-year old boy, as if he really was Sean, which opens a new can of worms in regards to pedophilia.

At the moment when Anna begins to think about the possibility of reincarnation the audience will feel that Birth is taking a sudden turn for the worse, as it provides a very disturbing element into the story.  Instead of a blissful reincarnation the audience gets to experience a taboo concept of love between two lovers, as one is a child and the other an adult.  None of the characters with, the exception of Joseph, step up to the plate and tells Anna that her interaction with the boy is wrong, but it is too late when she has fallen under the spell of the boy.  This is when others begin to voice their opinion, which causes some awkwardness in the story.  Furthermore, no one questions the boy's sanity, or how he could possible know what he knows, and when they do it only displays a feeble attempt by someone within the family.  It is even hard for the audience to questions the boy, as several visual cues and symbols that have been presented in the film suggest that reincarnation has taken place.

There is strong potential in the story through the disturbing element, but the director Jonathan Glazer's use of strong visual symbols and signs only serves the purpose of misdirection, which develops a fraudulent and deceitful atmosphere in the film.  The misdirection of the symbolism overweighs the few occasions when the film provides some factual scenes that could cue the audience in the right direction.  Yet, these could also be misleading, as one does not know what could be true in the sense of what one sees.  Maybe, Glazer intended to generate the same hypnotic feeling that Anna experienced through the little boy and what he said, but this hypothesis does not provide any strength to how the audience will experience the film.

The camera work and the cast’s performance generate a strong sense of disconnection, which actually helps the films atmosphere as it provides the feeling that there is something wrong with the whole situation.  Nicole Kidman's performance is radiantly strong, as she displays the bewildering power of grief, love, and disconnection in a genuine manner.  However, Kidman's performance does not save the film, as the visual symbolism merely functions as a tool of misdirection and it truly hurts the quality of the film through the overt use of the visual allegory.  This misdirection, as mentioned before, leaves the audience with two different notions.  One, the feeling of deceit, and two, the feeling that one should not underestimate the power of what one observes.  In the end, the audience will have experienced a disturbing tale, which could have been better developed, yet it offers some interesting contemplation.

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COUNTRY

USA

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