Category: Movie Reviews

“Eternal You” raises intriguing ethical questions about this burgeoning use of technology.

The only thing holding “The Colors Within” back from being an unqualified great movie is its overly familiar plot.

Certain films are so close to being good, so close to achieving a rare level of brilliance, your anger springs from said work not reaching those heights. Director Neill Blomkamp’s “Gran Turismo,” a crowd-pleasing, genre-bending sports drama, approaches wonder with an odd tepidness; it maneuvers around any modicum of character development by taking all-too simple routes and swerves away from formal experimentatio, opting instead for simple enjoyment.  

And yet, I can’t say I wasn’t invested in every race, lap, and turn. Nor can I say the climax didn’t successfully tug my heart toward an emotional response as the intrepid Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a teenager who rose from gamer to real-life car racer, passed the finish line. 

“Gran Turismo” is an uncommon yet familiar biopic, a video game-inspired narrative with unique strengths and recurrent weaknesses. For one, as Mardenborough likes to say, the property the film takes inspiration from isn’t a game; it’s a simulator. Players can customize vehicles to startling specific details through a seemingly infinite library of parts to imitate a range of makes and models that rival professional drivers (Blomkamp attempts to visualize such realism by having transparent VFX cars envelop Mardenborough whenever he plays). 

Marketing extraordinaire Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) knows the potentiality of such skill: He goes to GT proposing a competition in which the top seven gamers will train to become an actual racer for the Nissan team. He also recruits seasoned veteran crew chief and former driver Jack Salter (David Harbour) as a trainer. Moore’s venture brings heavy risk. And yet, when Jack asks Moore what the marketer gets out of this, Moore doesn’t have an answer. Despite Bloom’s inspired take, the wobbly, incomprehensible motivations of Moore only offer frustration.

Mardenborough’s desires are clearer cut: He wants to work on real cars. His father, Steve (Djimon Hounsou), a former professional footballer presently relegated to menial jobs, wants his son to be practical, lest he end up like his old man, filled with broken dreams. We don’t get much screen time or interiority from any Mardenborough family member. He has a doting, understanding mother (Geri Halliwell) and a partying immature brother (Daniel Puig), but they only fulfill the basic duty of filling out morsels of screen time. At a party, Mardenborough meets Audrey (Maeve Courtier-Lilley), whom he’ll keep up vicariously via Instagram. It’s disappointing that she never evolves narratively beyond being the dream girl on Mardenborough’s screen.

The young gamers turned drivers in the GT Academy are similarly thinly sketched. They’re inchoate obstacles who, once again, merely round out the biopic’s run time. The Academy’s more pressing narrative function is to serve as a site for Mardenborough and Jack’s budding rapport. The latter is skeptical that these keyboard warriors possess the physical and competitive acumen to become professionals. Jason Hall and Zach Baylin’s script plays an exhausting game of keep-away about Jack’s tragic backstory (are we supposed to believe that Mardenborough, a perpetually online teenager, didn’t Google his trainer?). 

“Gran Turismo” doesn’t really kick into gear until Mardenborough moves past the Academy to real racing, where he competes against teams hostile to simulator racers. It’s difficult not to hear characters say that sim drivers will never replace real drivers without thinking about the real-life struggle SAG-AFTRA and WGA face against AI, even if Mardenborough is a real person. Blomkamp portrays people like Mardenborough as plucky outsiders, not unlike the bobsledders in “Cool Runnings.” The film’s use of common sports movie tropes unexpectedly aligning with real-world concerns makes for uneasy tension. 

Those tropes keep the viewer engaged even when the on-screen storytelling doesn’t wholly deserve it. While you’d expect editors Colby Parker, Jr. and Austyn Daines, along with cinematographer Jacques Jouffret, to match real gameplay rhythms and virtual visuals, the freeze frames that tell viewers what lap we’re on crush the pace, and the information provided is often repetitive to the dialogue. 

Even so, tropes are tropes because they work. For Mardenborough and Jack, it’s us against the world. A rivalry between Mardenborough and an ultra-rich racing team adds a dash of tension; a tragic crash gives Mardenborough a comeback story; a harrowing speech by the ever-dependable Hounsou puts the finishing touches on this underdog story and fully invests the viewer in the cares of an unassuming teenager. While “Gran Turismo” has greater issues than what’s outlined here, some nitpicky, others larger in scope—Madekwe as a lead is low-key to the point of invisibility—Blomkamp furnishes just enough cautionary thrills.  

In theaters Friday, August 25th. 

“Back on the Strip,” about a young man who wants to become a magician and the middle-aged ex-strippers who train him to be an exotic dancer instead, is a slapped-together indie comedy. It would probably crater completely and become unwatchable were it not for the charisma of its actors, which is boundless, and the lightheartedness of the entire project: it knows that the purpose of this movie is to make people laugh, no matter what it takes, and that the more shameless the joke or sight gag, the bigger the laugh. 

The five strippers, who were stars in Las Vegas in the 1990s and called themselves The Chocolate Chips, are played by Wesley Snipes (as Luther, aka “Mr. Big”), J.B. Smoove (as Amos, a preacher by day), Bill Bellamy (as Tyriq, a stay-at-home dad to four daughters he sired with his wife, a female bodybuilder), Faison Love (as Desmond, a garage owner who’s gained 100 pounds since his stripping days), and Gary Owen (a white doctor with a breast augmentation clinic who, back in the day, fooled the other four into thinking he was Black; more on that in a moment). Any of these actors has more charm and comic timing in his pinky toe than most actors have in their whole bodies. The film benefits enormously just from having them onscreen, getting the old “band” back together, working through the differences that split them up 25 years ago, and busting each other’s chops with the easygoing intimacy of brothers. 

Unfortunately, the movie isn’t really about them. It’s about Merlin and his career ambitions and romantic problems. Will he win his dream job and dream girl? You know the answer, and the movie knows you know the answer, but it stays focused on Merlin, to the point where “Back on the Strip” turns into a modern equivalent of one of those old movies that cast aging comedians that audiences actually came to the theater to see, but subordinates their clowning to a love story between two comparatively bland leads. The movie gets a lot better once the Chocolate Chips get together again and start rehearsing and reconnecting, and it gives all of the characters a subplot. 

When we meet Merlin, he’s a high school senior in Los Angeles who’s madly in love with his best friend and magic assistant Robin (Raigin Harris), one of those cheerful, poised, beautiful, smart ciphers that lovable, ambitious heroes often have in comedies. Merlin wants to go to Las Vegas and hit big as an illusionist, and tells Robin about his goal. Alas, his performance at the high school magic show is ruined by his own mistakes, then by the treachery of one of his rivals, the leader of a group of all-white self-styled gangsta rappers from Beverly Hills, who pulls down Merlin’s pants and underwear onstage. Thus do we learn of Merlin’s true gift: a member so enormous that when we see it tucked into his underwear, it suggests a two-foot-long kielbasa folded in half.

Flash-forward a few years to Merlin after college: he’s working as a birthday party clown with trio of other clowns and still dreaming of going to Vegas when he runs into Robin again. Unfortunately, Merlin also meets her snotty, condescending boyfriend, who is about to become her fiancé: Blaze (Ryan Alexander Holmes), who says he’s a comedian but is mainly an “influencer” who spends seemingly every waking moment recording himself and his posse and posting the footage online. Merlin’s supportive single mother Verna (Tiffany Haddish) helps her son make his big move to Vegas by calling up her old friend Rita (Colleen Camp), an old stoner who runs a run-down motel with a burned-out neon sign (the only working letters spell out “VAGINA”) and arranges for Merlin to stay there for a week while auditioning for magic gigs and obsessing over his loss of Robin.

If you’re reading this and thinking, “I’ve seen this nice guy-nice girl-rotten fiancé configuration a million times—what about the aging strippers played by a bunch of can’t-miss character actors?”, you’re just going to have to deal with it, because the movie is determined to go through the motions and contrivances of keeping the appealingly performed but boringly written Merlin and Robin from realizing their destiny, right up until the climax, which fans of a certain famous storyline on “A Different World” would have seen coming from twenty kielbasas away even if the characters didn’t have a long scene where they talked about it while watching a rerun. Directed by Chris Spencer, who cowrote the screenplay with Eric Daniel, “Back on the Strip” doesn’t trouble itself with anything it isn’t actually interested in, such as giving the romantic leads real and complicated personalities rather than writing them as a couple of ingenues, or, for that matter, even making you believe that young Merlin is a good or even competent magician. 

In theaters now.

Some of you may remember the novel and subsequent film I Don’t Know How She Does It, the title of which was a common expression of wonderment attached to its protagonist, a woman juggling motherhood and career. After a dire, unsettling prologue—one that appears, for a period, to have nothing to do with what comes after—“Madeleine Collins” (a title that, like the aforementioned prologue, only makes sense late in the movie) shows us how one woman juggles a career and two different households in which she’s a mother.

There’s Geneva, where “Margot” is the hard-pressed partner of Abdel and mom to adorable clingy toddler Ninon; she works in the city as a translator. Then there’s Paris, where “Judith” is the adored and sharp-dressing wife of Melvil, a celebrated orchestra conductor. There she looks after two sons; one of them, Joris, is getting old enough to suspect that his mom is not entirely what she seems.

Margot and Judith are the same woman, played with an intense emphasis on the stress that’s building in her untenable situation by Virginie Efira, best known to viewers here for her work in Paul Verhoeven’s “Elle” and “Benedetta.” In Antoine Berraud’s film, which he wrote in collaboration with Hélène Klotz, she begins on a note of everyday beleaguered confidence and/or faith that’s not uncommon in a woman’s world. The more we learn about her situation, the more curious it becomes. Abdel is aware of her other life in Paris. And Melvil knows who Abdel is. More than the audience does at first, actually. But Melvil is not privy to the life his wife shares with the other man. It turns out that Judith/Margot’s parents have ties to both domestic situations but no idea of the whole picture.

As snags and coincidental meetings mount up—here’s a former co-worker from years back encountering her under a different name in Geneva! Here’s the scruffy underworld ID forger who has a crush on her and so deliberately gave her a card that expired way before five years were up!—and Judith comes more and more under the snooty eye of Parisian teen son Joris (played with note-perfect petulance by Thomas Gioria), this character, whose true name is never, it seems, really known to the viewer, starts to come apart.

Berraud’s juggling a few themes here—that of the varied roles we’re compelled to take on in life, here pushed to hard limits, and that of the difficulty of being a woman, a popular topic these days. Between the prologue and how the movie’s narrative grows more frantic—not to mention the use of Romain Trouillet’s music that owes a lot to Hitchcock-era Bernard Herrmann—Berraud wants to push this material into the realm of something like a suspense thriller. It doesn’t quite work, especially given the reveal of what drove Efira’s character to her deceits, which, while meant to be heartstring-pulling, plays as rather more banal than one might have expected.  

But the settings are better than credible, as is the acting across the board. Quim Gutierrez is sympathetic and surly as Abdel, who eventually grows so exasperated with his arrangement that he brings another woman into the household. Bruno Salomone, as Melvil, projects a relatively benign self-involvement that makes his inability to see what’s going on almost a given. Jacqueline Bisset is welcome in a supporting role as Margot/Judith’s mother. But the movie is most naturally a showcase for Efira, whose work as an unusual 17^th-century nun in “Benedetta” demonstrated she could play dazzling and tormented with equal facility and who gets to work a similar range here.  

Now playing in theaters. 

“Bad Things,” writer/director Stewart Thorndike’s sophomore feature, is a queer reinterpretation of Stanley Kubrick’s classic “The Shining.” Ruthie (Gayle Rankin) is the inheritor of the Comely Suites, a suburban, snowy hotel passed down by her mother. Ruthie’s relationship with her mother is fraught, and her connection to the hotel is equally traumatic. 

When she brings her girlfriend Cal (Hari Nef) and coupled friends Maddie (Rad Pereira) and Fran (Annabelle Dexter-Jones) for a weekend getaway, the influence of the hotel, and their isolation within it, becomes oppressive. Bad things happen in the Comely Suites, and between Ruthie’s teetering disposition, Fran’s neuroticism, and underlying seeds of doubt, envy, and anger between the group, the friends find themselves at the mercy of various volatile influences.

Thorndike’s film wears its inspiration on its sleeve, from the snowed-in hotel linked to a seemingly inevitable descent into madness to a scene across the hotel bar. And “Bad Things” is something of reinvention, with male patriarchal madness turned to traumatic female rage and family units spun into the intersection of relationships and friendship. But Thorndike’s high-magnitude, cherished concept just never fulfills its potential

Where the central four characters’ friendship and intersecting romantic relationships are meant to be the film’s grounding center, there’s nothing but flimsy connections and dead air. There’s no chemistry between the characters and no genuine feeling in their performances. Their friendship is far from believable, and, as the core of the film’s tension, this failure leaves “Bad Things” lacking emotional investment in its stakes.

Ruthie’s relationship with her mother plays out over unanswered texts and vague mentions, and a history of infidelity tarnishes her relationship with Cal. But every scattered seed of personal history isn’t given the support from the script that allows them to grow into worthwhile inclusions. Ruthie is aloof and angry, and that’s pretty much it. With a script that begs us to give in to her plight, her character is simply too flat to inspire any interest. The trauma plot, which feeds the film’s subtext, is a bit cherry-picked. It comes across as an addition to give the film a semblance of deeper meaning rather than a truly thoughtful exploration of pain’s resilient ties to time and place. 

The look of “Bad Things” is its strongest element. Its cinematography is cold and clinical, harshly objective compared to the hotel’s sometimes surrealist resonance and elusive layout. The entirety of the space is explored, from the pool to cluttered ballrooms and stark placeless rooms. It effectively becomes a character responsible for the eerie, unsettling tone. 

“Bad Things” juggles too many elements with too little focus. It plays out like a waiting game, with a pace that stumbles through its 84-minute runtime with plenty of hollow conversations and a few teases of tension. The relationships meant to hold the film together are floss-bound and flimsy, and the peeks into character histories are thrown away as quickly as they’re mentioned. “Bad Things” is thoughtful as a concept—a ruminant queer and female-forward reinvention of a familiar tale. But by the time any emotional upheaval and bloodshed have paid off, the film has already fatigued itself and its audience.

Now playing on Shudder.  

Michael Cera does an impeccable Marge Simpson impression midway through Dustin Guy Defa’s “The Adults” in a scene in which his character, a vengeful poker player named Eric, doesn’t want to say what he’s really feeling. It’s a defense mechanism Eric shares with his siblings, the similarly aged Rachel (Hannah Gross) and the younger Maggie (Sophia Lillis). They can all do different cartoonish voices. The siblings also sing original songs and dance, with some scenes of their stressful but low-key reunion within “The Adults” suddenly breaking into reams of lyrics and coordinated hand jives, remnants of a creative bond these siblings once shared. Now it’s a way in which they don’t actually talk to each other. 

“The Adults” has many scenes with strange voices and random song-and-dance numbers, and each time it’s a brilliant, animated interpretation of how family bonds can seep into superficiality. Trying to make people laugh instead of letting them see the authentic you; going through the motions, no cues needed. “The Adults” is perceptive and funny about this throughout in a way that is anti-razzmatazz just as much as it is anti-twee. Writer/director Defa and his three excellent performances present this “quirky” family trait without a trace of irony. 

The movie’s premise is overly, perhaps knowingly familiar–Eric returns home for the first time in years and faces the people and pain he left behind. Rachel is not amused, feeling the burn of Eric’s disappearance and detachment. He doesn’t consider all that Rachel has shared in brief communications about her past woes (about her ex, about their mom dying, about her inheriting the family house); he doesn’t fully grasp how funereal she has become, adorned in different shades of black and with her clothes always covering her neck. But he does criticize her for not being as fun as she used to be. Gross captures how exhausting it can be in Rachel’s shoes, illustrating her resulting defensive nature with a tragic coldness. 

Eric makes the visit home all the more teeth-gnashing for Rachel by saying it will be short. Eric even lies about what else will be keeping him busy on the trip and insists on staying at a hotel despite his two sisters living nearby. He has such low bandwidth for his family that he pretends to take a call during a bowling trip and goes to the claw machine instead. 

Rachel is worried about what Eric’s reemergence will do to Maggie, who is extremely excited to see her older brother, and unaware that he’s mostly in town to win poker games, extending his stay each night to maintain a hot streak. But Maggie lacks Rachel’s cynicism, at least for now, and is closer to the golden days of the siblings before loss and distance broke up their band. She got the memo to speak in monotone during this uncertain reunion, and yet Maggie is the first person to break into song as they sit in the backyard of the family home, with Eric eventually joining her. She is the source of the movie’s tightest hugs. Lillis’ performance, her giddiness cracking through the solemnity that comes with such dysfunction, is full of worrisome vulnerability and warming energy. 

“The Adults” is a triage of dynamic characters, and its version of a “villain” helps the story become all that more distinct. Michael Cera has been absent from lead movie roles for a couple of years, but in the role of Eric, he returns with an intriguing intensity and is well in control of his sometimes novel presence (as in “Barbie”). There’s a striking, alarming uncertainty to the scowl he reveals when the sister hang-out isn’t working for him or when he’s doing that Marge Simpson accent. At night, when playing poker, he further reveals Eric’s smug need for admiration but layers it with increasing uncertainty about his true story. It turns out that Cera’s cameo in Aaron Sorkin’s poker story “Molly’s Game” (as “Player X”) was no fluke; he really does have the chops for mind games and limited tells. It’s one of his best performances yet, and it’s fitting for a movie that encourages you to read all faces closely.

Defa’s film aligns with the notion that it’s how a story is told–how it feels–and not just what it is about. And there is so much to feel from his take on dysfunction, including how it presents siblings who can sing and dance in unison but are not friends. “The Adults” is defined by such crucial touches: even the incredible, jazzy score by Alex Weston is careful with its flute and piano as if trying to tiptoe around the story’s awkwardness. Wide shots from Tim Curtin’s cinematography of Rachel and Eric standing across from each other, both marooned in the same frame, couldn’t be more painful. Watching Eric join his sisters in a dance routine later on couldn’t be more hopeful, however bittersweet.  

Now playing in theaters. 

Aggressively mediocre, Netflix’s “The Monkey King” takes no risks and offers too little humor, heart, or action to entertain all but the youngest in the family. Anyone in your clan old enough to read and not merely be enchanted by loud noises and flashing colors will likely get bored by this 96-minute movie that feels twice as long.

Tales of the Mandarin Chinese character known as Sun Wukong, or the Monkey King, have been told for generations, adapted into manga, TV series, and films many times. In fact, the great Stephen Chow, who made “Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons” in 2013 (along with must-sees “Kung Fu Hustle” and “Shaolin Soccer,” both directly referenced here) is an executive producer on this project, lending a bit of cultural credence to a Chinese tale being told by an American animator. However, director Anthony Stacchi, who helmed the hit “Open Season” and the excellent “The Boxtrolls,” fails to find enough that feels like actual cultural specificity here. It’s a truly generic tale of heroism, a road trip movie that takes two characters literally to Hell and back but doesn’t find much of interest on the journey. It’s a harmless animated adventure and a time-killer. Sometimes that’s all it takes for harried parents, but one of the most famous legends in Chinese history deserves better.

Telling part of the first section of Journey to the West, “The Monkey King” centers that tome’s most beloved character, voiced a bit annoyingly by an inconsistent Jimmy O. Yang. Considering himself more than an ordinary simian, The Monkey King strives to be an immortal, and to be one, he must defeat 100 demons with his magical staff (Nan Li), a clever idea rendered dully here. He eventually partners with a girl named Lin (Jolie Hoang-Rappaport) on his journey into mythological history, and the partnership between a monkey who is convinced he’s a hero and a girl who’s convinced she could never be one does give a film that was too narratively loose some much-needed structure (although it’s interesting to note that Lin is a creation of this version of this tale and not the source).

“The Monkey King” gets its most visual and character strength from the Dragon King, a singing, dancing, power-mad creation voiced well by Bowen Yang of “Saturday Night Live.” A true villain in a piece that doesn’t have one for too long, Yang’s egocentric demon gives the final act of “The Monkey King” some needed stakes and some well-crafted fight choreography, courtesy of Siwei Zou. When the film occasionally channels Chow’s sense of martial arts whimsy, it finds some momentum. But it regularly then lurches to a halt for a generic conversation between Monkey and Lin or another episodic encounter along the way, often scored to a heavy-metal riff that mistakes loud for exciting.

Of course, “The Monkey King” will eventually impart some lessons, including one about the title character getting too powerful for his own good in the final act. That the script by Ron J. Friedman, Stephen Bencich, and Rita Hsiao includes the actual Buddha in its climax could lead to a few interesting conversations with the little ones about peace, acceptance, and belief. However, like so many aspects of “The Monkey King,” it’s more like a prompt instead of an actual conversation.

Netflix has excelled over the last few years with some of the best animation out there. Projects like “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” and “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” got a lot of deserved attention, but there have also been many lesser-known family flicks that featured far more ambition than what’s often seen in theaters (“Klaus,” “The Sea Beast,” “The Willoughbys,” and more). I approached “The Monkey King” with the hope it could be 2023’s surprise Netflix animated classic. It won’t be joining the immortals of the form any time soon.

On Netflix now.

In writer/director Vuk Lungulov-Klotz’s feature debut, “Mutt,” time never slows down for his busy lead character, Feña (Lio Mehiel). The story follows a day in the life of a trans man living in New York City, which in this movie, means coping with prejudice and trying to resolve everyday problems. At a club, Feña reconnects with his old ex-boyfriend, John (Cole Doman), who later asks to see and feel the scars of Feña’s top surgery yet walks away coldly after spending the night together. Next, Feña’s younger sister, Zoe (MiMi Ryder), shows up unannounced after running away from school, but he has other worries on his mind, like how his mom may accuse him of kidnapping his sister (they’re estranged), how the bank won’t cash his check because his current name does not match his deadname, and how his friend who promised to lend their car to pick up Feña’s father (another estranged parent) from the airport has fallen through. It’s one long, difficult day, but Feña muddles through, one step at a time, in front of Lungulov-Klotz’s camera. 

Feña’s New York odyssey brings to mind movies like “After Hours” or “Do the Right Thing,” where a character crosses many people in a short span of time, an experience intensified by the city’s density. But the film’s always-on-the-go pacing resembles more of “Tangerine,” Sean Baker’s film about two trans women of color in Los Angeles. “Mutt” is structured so tightly there are few moments where the film finally slows down enough to let the characters exist, for quiet moments that allow for conversation and confession. And fortunately or unfortunately for Feña, the majority of these vulnerable moments are spent with his complicated ex. This is not an easy, laid back day, and that pacing can feels exhausting at times. 

Lungulov-Klotz’s story also functions like a double-edged sword, especially when it comes to hostile moments like when Feña is misgendered, insensitively questioned by strangers, ostracized by family, or told to hide his trans identity. It’s heartbreaking and frustrating, and he only has so much energy in a given day to cope with people’s ignorance. I can understand how constant rounds of having to justify his existence can wear on audiences already subjected to those same comments and judgments. For some, seeing that oppression onscreen may feel like seeing their experiences represented, seen, and validated. For others, it’s a painful reminder many times over of how the rest of the cis world treats them. “Mutt” offers little in terms of escapism but sticks closer to an intensified version of realism compressed into a brief runtime. 

As Feña, Lio Mehiel conjures up a scrappy screen presence that doesn’t feel too polished or too awkward. He’s wounded yet protective, unafraid to point out his ex’s hypocrisy yet still attracted to him and can’t help but let his eyes meet John’s. We see him reluctantly look after his sister, and work through his network of friends for a helping hand in a time of need. In cinematographer Matthew Pothier’s camera, the frame often closes in on his face, his determined stare, his outrage at bigots, his concern for his sister, and frustration over his bad day. He carries the film on his thin shoulders, beckoning the audience to hurry up and follow him to his next stop. 

The most rewarding scenes are the ones shared between Feña and his sister, Zoe. For once, he is not being micro-aggressed, not being measured to the physicality he used to have. Zoe takes him for who he is: a big brother, sometimes reluctant to help, but ready to step up when needed and listen to her problems. And when Zoe does mess up Feña’s plans, like locking him out of a date’s apartment with his keys and wallet inside, Feña doesn’t retaliate the way their mother does. In small conversations, we see them bond over each other’s pain. 

“Mutt” sticks close to Feña’s perspective, keeping almost all of the other characters at a distance. The isolation he feels when he cannot rely on friends, family, or former lovers adds to agonizing loneliness in a city teeming with people. Lungulov-Klotz’s feature debut is a complicated film that can pull in a viewer or alienate them. It’s so concentrated in its intensity that it can draw in one’s sympathy or exhaust them. It’s a film with a lot on its mind, a frenetic energy to make it to the end of the day, and a character we root for from start to finish. 

Now playing in theaters. 

Bodies are messy. Women’s bodies are especially messy. There are so many phases, and so much can go wrong! There are so many procedures required to make things run smoothly, and these procedures are sometimes painful, placing women at the mercy of medical professionals who treat women’s pain with cavalier indifference. (This pain gap has generated a lot of chatter recently.) The pain and stress of having a body subject to the whims of natural (or unnatural) forces is the subject of Laura Moss’ riveting “birth/rebirth,” where two women merge into a joint Dr. Frankenstein as they attempt to re-animate the body of a dead child. 

“birth/rebirth” has some “body horror” tropes and some straight horror tropes, but it’s not really a monster story. It’s more of a medical thriller, helmed by two twisted conspirators, both operating from a place of desperation and trauma. The tone Moss establishes makes the events seem almost plausible. What if human bodies could regenerate themselves like a starfish does? Is there any way a dead body could come back to life through legitimate medical means?

The two main characters—Rose (Marin Ireland) and Celie (Judy Reyes)—are well-prepared to address this question. Rose works in a hospital morgue, and Celie is a labor/delivery nurse. To call Rose intense is an understatement: she is forbiddingly anti-social and clearly keeping secrets. On the other hand, Celie is raising her daughter Lila (A.J. Lister) on her own and is well-loved by her colleagues. She clearly loves her job. The two women work in the same hospital but don’t know each other. When Lila dies unexpectedly from bacterial meningitis, Rose—who has already been performing regeneration experiments in her apartment and has successfully brought a dead pig named Muriel back to life—sees her chance for the ultimate experiment. Rose packs the corpse in a suitcase and brings it back to her mad scientist’s lair. When Celie discovers Lila’s body has been “lost,” she suspects Rose and follows her home.

One of the main strengths of “birth/rebirth” is Moss’ resistance to the expected. One might expect Celie to be outraged at what Rose has done. One might expect the film to unfold as a battle of wills: Rose fighting to keep her experiment going and Celie attempting to thwart it and rescue Lila for a proper burial. One might expect Lila to “re-animate” as a monster, turning on her saviors with murderous violence. But … none of that happens.

Instead, we get the absurd spectacle of Celie and Rose, medical professionals, teaming up to work on the experiment. Celie moves in with Rose. They take shifts watching over the dead child. They rush out the door to their real jobs. They pack lunches in the kitchen. Muriel, the regenerated pig, snuffles in the corner, and Lila lies in bed, her skin a purplish hue. Since fetus cells are needed to make the essential serum, Celie uses her position at the hospital to acquire it through dishonest—and, frankly, monstrous—means. Even more terrible is the glimpse of how Rose got those fetus cells before Celie, the maternity nurse, came along. It involves unwitting men, bar bathrooms, globs of collected sperm, and syringes. It’s gruesome, but not half as gruesome as how Rose handles her eventual pregnancies. Much of this is stomach-churning, but the subversiveness of “birth/rebirth” is that almost everything shown is an everyday medical procedure, procedures women endure every day in the normal world. The physical demands of having a body, of getting pregnant, bringing a pregnancy to term, of labor, delivery, infertility, damaged cervixes, and all the rest … are here, but twisted. These women will stop at nothing. It’s a match made in mad-scientist heaven.

Both actresses deliver layered and complex performances. The film is often funny, one of the many ways Moss allows for the unexpected. The humor comes from the juxtaposition of what Rose and Celie are trying to do with how matter of fact they are doing it. The dead child lies in bed as the women make lunches, or feed the omnipresent Muriel, or problem-solve each crisis. They make cracks about one another’s diet like a bickering married couple. “At least you didn’t do anything unethical like eat a ham sandwich,” snaps Celie at one point. Celie is all warm and caring; Rose is cold and calculated. Together they make a formidable team. They will use anyone and anything to achieve their goals. In this, they betray the women in their care—dead and alive. Natural biological processes are often very stressful. Nobody knows this better than Celie: she knows the buttons to push with a nervous pregnant woman, and she does.

It’s amazing how far “birth/rebirth” goes into this amoral territory. Lila’s regeneration is a “miracle,” although Rose balks at the term when Celie uses it. This is science, nothing more. The mood established is eerie and mournful, the colors muted and hospital-morgue-green. There are barely any scenes outdoors. Nature doesn’t exist in this world. Ariel Marx’s score is well-placed, sometimes taking on a light tone, adding to the destabilized atmosphere—the music drones on subliminally in an eerie counterpoint. There are a couple of false notes along the way, where Lila’s regeneration seems to be going off the rails, where the supernatural appears to be raising its dead-eyed head. These scenes come from another movie running on “expected” lines.

Two small moments, neither of which center on Celie or Rose, stand out as pointed reminders of the resonances at play in this creepy tale. Early on, Celie assists with a birth. The woman is working hard; the husband stands by supportively. Suddenly the doctor says, “I’m going to perform an episiotomy,” and the woman gasps, “Oh, please, let me try to do it myself!” In her plea is every story you hear about women’s choices being ignored, their concerns about their own bodies dismissed and overruled. In the second moment, a pregnant woman is in crisis on the delivery table, enduring the chaos of an emergency C-section. The nurse reassures her, “Your baby’s going to be fine, I promise you.” Good news! The pregnant woman asks foggily, “What about me?” She’s terrified. The nurse barely understands the question. What about you? What kind of question is that for a pregnant woman to ask? Who cares about you?

Now playing on Shudder.