Laura Moss‘ incredibly dark medical horror birth/rebirth shows that original, disturbing stories can be told in the increasingly crowded area of genre films that deal with grief and the bonds between parent and child. Taking its inspiration from the story that arguably began the sci-fi and horror genres, this Modern Prometheus leads the viewer into a sickening ethical underworld, that is as horrendous to witness as any of the impressively-staged body horror on display.

Rose (a terrifyingly single-minded Marin Ireland) is a pathologist who is clearly far happier dealing with the dead. Celie (Judy Reyes, back in scrubs again) is a midwife. Under normal circumstances, never the twain should meet. However, Celie’s vibrant little girl Lila (A.J. Lister) tragically dies from bacterial meningitis, and her body mysteriously goes missing. On investigation, Celie discovers Rose has a shadowy medical obsession and that Lila has made a perfect subject for experimentation. This leads both women into an uneasy alliance and down the darkest of moral paths.

It’s unusual to see a film where the very premise provokes as visceral a reaction as any scenes of carnage it may contain. In fact, it’s best to avoid some of the synopses and go into birth/rebirth as blind as possible, as the execution of its storytelling is jaw-dropping. Just when you think Moss and co-writer Brendan J. O’Brien have plumbed the moral depths of a situation that begins on a subterranean level, they somehow drill further into further ghastly, stygian revelation. It’s fairly restrained in what it shows in terms of visuals, but what it forces the viewer to consider is deeply, deeply upsetting.

That birth/rebirth works so well is down to everyone involved taking the potentially ludicrous premise through to the appallingly logical extremes of its conclusion with utter conviction. The two leads do phenomenal work, without which the entire film would fall apart. It’s been argued elsewhere that Celie’s reaction to a whiplash slalom of grief, horror, and hope severs the entire edifice at the knees, and it does require that leap from the audience. But Reyes is compelling enough to sell that suspension of disbelief, and she somehow keeps at least some of the viewer’s empathy, even when she uses her soothing bedside manner to manipulate one of her patients (a heartbreaking Breda Wool) to obtain required perinatal material.

But if one squints hard enough (and that’s quite feasible given Lisa Forst‘s sparingly-used, but brutally convincing practical effects), there’s a visible seam of the blackest of humour, which goes a long way to prevent birth/rebirth becoming too bleak and exercise. The two women fall into an amusing odd-couple co-parenting setup, and there are some nice comic moments between the pair such as Celie mocking Rose’s militantly vegan stance given how many other ethical positions shes’s willing to disregard. These (relatively) lighter moments also work to throw the horror into even more chiaroscuro relief.

Despite a few potential issues of characterisation – and there’s a possible discussion to be had whether Rose is an example of an Autistic-coded character being equated as cold and immoral – birth/rebirth is a ferociously unsettling horror played with complete commitment an capable of worming its way beneath the skin even when one hasn’t the experience of parenthood. It’s easy to assume sometimes that the horror genre has lost a lot of its ability to shock. birth/rebirth shows there’s plenty of life in the old corpse yet.

Screening as part of Sundance Festival 2023