Birth: Love Eternal

Kidman is highly skilled at conveying this extreme emotional lability. In one of the most lauded sequences, Anna is dressing for the opera when she has another disturbing encounter with Sean. She crouches to his level and tells him he is hurting her, that he has to stop bothering her. Her eyes glow. As she walks to the door, he collapses, his fall accompanied by the hounding strings of the prologue to Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, music that is about submission to fate. She and Joseph arrive late to the opera and shuffle to their seats. While the music gathers in intensity, Harris Savides’s camera swoops toward her face, hunting out a paroxysm of feeling as her features oscillate between hope, confusion, excitement, and abandon. As in the film’s prelude, the overlapping or bleeding through of music between scenes is crucial to the emotional effect, which itself resembles a spell.

Much has been made over the years—particularly during the film’s all-too-dismissive initial reception—about the queasy premise of a child and an adult locked together in a quasi-romantic bond. Anna asks whether Sean can satisfy her, allows him to climb seemingly naked into a bathtub with her, kisses him, and eventually decides that they will run away together and marry when he is twenty-one. “How are you going to fulfill my needs?” she inquires. “You ready for that? You ever made love to a girl?”

All this is disturbing to watch, particularly the spectacle of Sean’s chubby exposed body as he undresses for the bath (Glazer has called this scene “the sharp end of the film . . . the razor’s edge”). But the film constantly destabilizes any literal reading, slipping away from realism into fairy tale or fable. There is the lingering possibility that this taciturn boy with his disquieting stare is either engaged in a con or truly the adult Sean. But Birth has very little in common with adult-child body-swap comedies like Big or Freaky Friday. It’s deeply concerned with irrationality and isolation, and in cinematic terms its closest influence is undoubtedly Stanley Kubrick.

In its glacial elegance and control, as well as its claustrophobic scrutiny on unraveling psyches, Birth recalls by turns Lolita, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut. Take the shots of the wrecked apartment after Joseph has attacked Sean, the last lingering on a piano rammed unnaturally into a wall. Here Glazer deploys the language of horror, of Shining-style poltergeist or paranormal activity, to convey extremes of irrational emotion in a tightly controlled world. As in all of Glazer’s films, sound, too, creates a counternarrative, giving vent to feelings that are otherwise suppressed.

Ironically, Birth had a difficult birth. Glazer began his career directing advertisements and music videos, before making his acclaimed feature debut, the stylish gangster film Sexy Beast, in 2000. He originally intended to follow it with Under the Skin, a very loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel. Instead, he became captivated by the fairy-tale strangeness of Birth. Under the Skin had to wait another thirteen years to be completed.

Glazer is famous for the time he dedicates to each film (his 2023 film, The Zone of Interest, was a ten-year project). He worked on the script of Birth for years with two screenwriters, Milo Addica and the late Jean-Claude Carrière, the legendary French writer and Luis Buñuel collaborator whose credits include The Tin Drum and Belle de jour. There were multiple changes of direction, including a last-minute shift of focus from the boy to the grieving widow, made mere weeks before filming began. Scripts were often delivered the night before shooting a scene, and the edit was protracted.

For me, one of the most interesting elements of the final construction is how effectively the film undoes itself. It is almost perversely keen to dismantle its own illusions, to confess its secrets and lay its workings bare. This makes it an entirely different film both in retrospect and on a second viewing (which makes this a good place to pause if you are reading prior to a first viewing).

The possibility that young Sean really is a reincarnation is shattered by that most classic literary device, a cache of letters. To understand how this works, we need to return to Anna’s engagement party, toward the beginning of the film. A couple, played by Peter Stormare and Anne Heche, arrive in the lobby. The man, Clifford, goes up in the elevator, while the woman, Clara, makes a flimsy excuse about a missing ribbon, before running into Central Park and burying a package under dead leaves.

Clifford, it transpires, was Sean’s best friend. In another of Kidman’s extraordinarily quicksilver scenes, Anna visits him to describe Sean’s return and beg for his help. Clara arrives late to a subsequent meeting that Anna and Clifford have arranged at Anna’s apartment, and takes young Sean into the bathroom for a strangely seductive interchange, in which she points out her dirty hands before writing her address on his wrist.

Later, in her flat, she informs the startled boy that she was Sean’s lover, his mistress. The parcel that she buried in Central Park was a box of love letters written by Anna to Sean, who had passed them to Clara unopened as a way of demonstrating which woman he loved best. It is from these letters that Sean has been constructing his false identity. They are the source of his eerie accumulation of knowledge. The proof is right there in his backpack.

One of the ways in which Sean’s status is made constantly ambiguous, even at this moment of seemingly total revelation, is that no adult treats him like a child. This includes his mother, who engages in forlorn bedtime role-play, pretending he is the captain of a ship, only to be dismissed when Sean says coldly: “I’m not your stupid son anymore.” Though Clara is certain Sean is not her former lover, she still taunts and physically attacks him. No adult cares for him reliably as a child. Even Anna can’t disengage from her own fantasy of love restored for long enough to wash his filthy face.

With young Sean unmasked as an impostor, I want to pause a moment on what this revelation means for Anna. The man she has been grieving for ten years was not, to put it mildly, worthy of her devotion. Their world-class romance (“We got married thirty times . . . thirty churches in thirty days”) collapses in on itself. She is in thrall to fantasy twice over, in that she has fallen in love with a false reincarnation of someone who was actively betraying her.

“A man has to support his wife,” she had said earlier to young Sean. “He has to feed her, defend her, take care of her. How are you going to feed me, defend me, take care of me? How are you going to do that?” Leaving aside the sexual politics, this is a pretty infantilizing view of marriage, its childishness underscored not only by Kidman’s breathy Marilyn voice but also by the fact that she and Sean are slurping up an ice-cream sundae.

In a 2004 interview with Charlie Rose (included in this release), Kidman described the state of unstoppable free fall her character was in. Falling in love represents a collapse of ego boundaries, faced with the beguiling, terrifying prospect of no longer being alone. Generally, or at least hopefully, we move on from this dangerous state into something more weathered, realistic, and mature. I don’t think it’s pushing too far, considering the fate of Anna’s love letters, to suggest that Birth regards the act of falling in love as frighteningly irrational, and is interested in the devastations to the self that can result from love’s excess as well as its lack.

Savides’s camera often catches people in scenes of abject isolation. Sean stands on a swing in a deserted playground at night; Joseph unpacks his suitcase in an empty house; Anna is lost in a crowd of people. If this is a horror story, it’s a horror story about being desperate for love, and about the vulnerability, loneliness, and difficulty in understanding other people that might drive this state—also major themes in Glazer’s next film, Under the Skin.

Anna’s eventual marriage to Joseph is hardly presented as a happy conclusion, as she runs in her white dress into a churning gray sea. Color has not returned to her world. But then there is the boy, who smiles for the very first time in his final shot, undoing the disquieting spell of his face. He protects Anna to the last, never revealing what he knows. “See you in the next life,” he says. Any analysis of Birth only opens up a deeper register of mystery. What was it between these two lonely people, if it wasn’t love?