Imagine for a moment that you are a single parent. You work as a nurse to support your child and walk a delicate balance between spending enough time with your child and working too much. One day, you leave for work, and the next time you have a moment to yourself, you check your phone to find a series of increasingly dire messages culminating with your worst nightmare: your child has died. She isn't there when you go to the morgue to see your child's lifeless body for yourself. You track down the morgue technician and find your child strapped to a bed, very much alive again.

This is the setup for Birth/Rebirth, and although parts of the premise might call Pet Sematary to mind, writer-director Laura Moss instead delivers a film with a fascinating twist on the Frankenstein story - at least in theory. Judy Reyes plays Celi, the mother in this story, and Marin Ireland plays Rose, the morgue technician and mad scientist. Each of them is excellent in this story, at times handling a lot of specific language and difficult emotions; the film itself, however, is a disappointing misfire.

The reason for this lies not with the cast or Moss's direction, which is appropriately moody and atmospheric, but in the script, which plays too safe with its ideas. Case in point, the scene where Celi discovers that her daughter is resurrected and there’s uncertainty around if this zombie is genuinely her daughter at all, she immediately digs into the logistics and plot implications of this discovery rather than the emotional ones. It's easy to see where the script was going with this, that a mother confronted with the resurrection of her child may immediately accept that, but that's not how it's played, either.  

The film often hints at and alludes to commentary on the societal notion that motherhood is an essential and defining part of womanhood, but never commits to broaching the topic in a bold or thought provoking way. Marin Ireland's mad scientist Rose gets the closest to offering audiences a compelling takeaway from Birth/Rebirth, but it's all so thinly drawn that the effort fails to land.

Furthermore, the film stops short of offering a horror experience worth talking about, lacking noteworthy moments or thrills. Birth/Rebirth relies heavily on a moody and atmospheric tone - perhaps too heavily - so that when a scene arises where the zombie child interacts with a pet, it’s a strange scene for the wrong reasons. Still, then, the film never commits to the idea that this resurrected child isn't the child that died anymore either, nor does it adequately explore the idea that Ireland's Rose (a character heavily telegraphed but never confirmed as being on the spectrum) has a deep enough understanding of people as she does the science involved in her mad experiment.

The composition of Birth/Rebirth’s premise ultimately turns out to be more unusual than the undead child it features, and aspects of the film turn out to hold more value than the film as a whole. Reyes and Ireland are both legitimately great and Moss’s curation of eerie atmosphere is enough to show promise for her growth as a feature filmmaker. Despite the shortcomings of Birth/Rebirth, I remain excited to see the next step of Moss’s filmmaking career - a career that deserves a rebirth more lively than the zombie child featured in this feature directorial debut.

Acting and Casting - 2 | Visual Effects and Editing - 1 | Story and Message - 1 | Entertainment Value - 1 | Music Score and Soundtrack - 1 | Reviewer's Preference - 0