The basic story points of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein have been explored and examined in so many films over the years that the very elements that once chilled people to the bone—particularly the transgression of Man creating life and therefore tampering in God’s domain—barely even register anymore. Laura Moss’s Birth/Rebirth attempts to correct that by specifically examining those ideas through a modern lens and, more importantly, through a specifically female perspective and while the results are sometimes a bit uneven, it is the rare contemporary horror film that is more interested in examining the moral and ethical dilemmas it raises than in indulging in cheap “BOO” effects and gratuitous gore.
The film centers on two women who work in the same hospital in wildly different capacities—Celi (Judy Reyes) is a nurse who spends her work hours helping in the maternity ward before heading home to spend time with six-year-old daughter Lila (A.J. Lister) while Dr. Rose Cooper (Marin Ireland) works in the morgue, where she steals the occasional body parts and goes to great lengths to harvest fetuses in order to use their genetic material in her off-book experiments into cellular regeneration. Their paths cross tragically when (Spoiler Alert) Lila dies of spinal meningitis and Rose steals the body, brings it back to her apartment and manages to revive it with her secret process. Having been informed that Lila’s body is missing, the grief-stricken Celi is determined to find it and eventually turns up at Rose’s door, where she is stunned to find her reanimated daughter. Of course, keeping Lila “alive” requires a lot of work and Rose and Celi enter into an unholy agreement to do what is necessary to keep her going—the former purely in the name of science and the latter as an increasingly grotesque way of trying to assuage her guilt over Lila’s original death—and things get increasingly grim for all concerned.
Of course, the basic concepts at the center of Birth/Rebirth are not necessarily new but Moss and co-writer Brendan J. O’Brien have managed to find an intriguing new approach to the material that makes it seem fresh, vital and actually unnerving. It takes the basic Frankenstein concept but uses it as a springboard not just for the usual thoughts about the perils of rash medical experimentations and meddling in things Man was not meant to handle, but as an undeniably bleak but nevertheless penetrating meditation on the dark side of motherhood ranging from Rose’s utter disinterest in the concept as anything other than a means to her very particular ends to the way that Celi’s maternal instinct veers into horrible areas as a result of her inability to properly deal with her child’s passing. The film also plays with audience expectations in intriguing ways as well, especially in regards to Lila, who—aside from one grisly aside that probably could have been left out—is not positioned as some kind of horrific monster that needs to be defeated in the last reel. Instead, she is seen more as a pitiable thing and it is her two mothers—one real, one ersatz—who are the ones driven to do monstrous things for purely selfish reasons and the moral and ethical questions raised by their actions that are the true heart of the film. (Don’t worry, gorehounds—there are plenty of guts and grisliness on display as well, which are presented here with a lack of overt sensation that ends up making them all the more unnerving as a result.)
Birth/Rebirth is a dark and discomfiting work from start to finish and while that combination may prove to be too much for the mass moviegoing audience to handle, horror fans looking for the real thing should definitely respond to it. It is made with skill, precision and quiet tension throughout, contains strong performances from the two leads (with Ireland once again demonstrating herself to be one of the most reliable presences in the horror genre today) and even offers up a few instances of wicked dark humor that blend in nicely with the otherwise ghastly proceedings. This is Moss’s feature directorial debut and it is such a sturdy and effective work (it is essentially the film that both screen iterations of Pet Sematary wanted to be but failed) that it will leave viewers feeling the same way that I did afterwards—creeped out and impressed in equal measure and instantly eager to see what she does with her next project.
In the opening scenes of Landscape with Invisible Hand, the screen adaptation of the 2017 MT Anderson novel of the same name, we discover that in the not-too-distant future, Earth has been benignly invaded by the Vuvv, an alien race that looks like giant wads of chewed bubble gum, communicates via flippers and come bearing astoundingly advanced technology that end up eradicating most forms of employment. As a result, the already-elite have grown even more prosperous and live on floating island cities in service to the Vuvv while most everyone else is left on Earth, forced to consume cheap processed food while struggling to survive. Among them is Adam (Asante Blackk), a budding teenaged artist living in near-poverty with his mother (Tiffany Haddish), a former lawyer, and younger sister. When he becomes attracted to the new girl in school, Chloe (Kylie Rogers), and discovers that she and her self-pitying father (Josh Hamilton) and loser brother (Michael Gandolfini) are living in their car, he invites them over to stay with his family. Although the Vuvv are highly advanced in many ways, they are still perplexed about this thing that we humans call love and are willing to pay good money to observe humans going through the rituals of courtship via Bluetooth-like devices that the participants wear. Since Adam and Chloe are already falling for each other, it seems like a good way to make some much-needed money and things are good for a while but the tensions between the two families end up affecting their relationship as well. Needing the money, they attempt to fake it but when the Vuvv figure out that they are no longer really in love, it kicks off a series of increasingly bizarre episodes as Adam and Chloe’s families go to weird lengths to stave off financial ruin.
When the film premiered at Sundance earlier this year, it caused a minor stir after its premiere when an audience member got into it with Haddish during the Q&A over whether a film with an evidently healthy budget and major studio backing belonged at that festival in the first place. Having finally seen it, I would say that the more pressing reason for why it shouldn’t have been invited is that it just isn’t very good. The film is clearly meant to be satirical in tone as it takes on such subjects as class division and the perils of living under a ostensibly benign state that wants to take things back to how they used to be (with values inspired almost entirely from 50s-era sitcoms) but the points that it strives to make are so basic and clumsily handled that it never finds the right tone—the whole thing feels like John Carpenter’s They Live remixed as a teen soap opera played at the wrong speed. Director Cory Finley, who did the intriguing dark comedy Thoroughbreds, never quite figures out a way to properly visualize our world under Vuvv occupation and the story jerks along in an episodic manner that leaves you thinking that a lot of stuff must have been dropped along the way without ever inspiring an urge to see any of that potential missing material. As our hero, Blackk is charismatic and compelling and to whatever degree that one finds themselves sticking to the story as it lurches from point to point, it is almost entirely due to his efforts. He is a find, to be sure, but unless you are in the mood for clumsy Level One sci-fi satire, you would be better off just waiting for his next project while giving Landscape with Invisible Hand the metaphorical back of yours.
The R-rated major studio comedy has made a bit of a comeback over the course of this strange cinematic summer with decidedly mixed results. First up was No Hard Feelings, which in which a more-than-game Jennifer Lawrence was let down by a clunky script that never came close to being the contemporary spin on Risky Business that it was hoping to be. On the other hand, Joy Ride was a hugely entertaining road trip movie that managed to be outrageous, hilarious and genuinely heartfelt in equal measure. Now—appropriately for the dog days of August—comes Strays, a tedious raunchfest that asks the question “What would one of those old Benji movies have been like if his misadventures had included swearing like a trucker, humping everything in sight, excessive peeing and puking and lots of dog shit?” and answers it with “Not much.” Utilizing the same kind of live animal/CGI technology hybrid that resulted in the lovely Babe films, this film focuses on Reggie (voiced by Will Ferrell), a dog so relentlessly optimistic that he doesn’t realize that his own (Will Forte) is an abusive monster who is constantly trying to abandon him, only to be foiled when Reggie makes his way back home to win what he thinks is a game. When the latest version of this “game” lands Reggie in a faraway city with no idea of how to return, he falls under the wing of another stray, street-smart Bug (Jamie Fox), who teaches him the ropes of living on the street—mostly what to eat, hump and pee on. Along with two other dogs—expert sniffer Maggie (Isla Fisher) and Hunter (Randall Park), a failed police dog sporting an ever-present cone and a huge penis—Bugs finally makes Reggie realize that his owner was a louse. This revelation inspires Reggie to attempt to once again make the long journey back home to his owner, albeit with a slightly different purpose than before—his goal this time is to bite off his owner’s penis as retribution for the abuse he has suffered.
Strays is essentially a one-joke film, one where the joke is not especially amusing the first time around and grows less amusing as it is repeated over and over again. As a two-minute short—maybe a fake trailer for a film spoofing the likes of such recent cute dog movies like Marley & Me and A Dog’s Purpose—I can see how this idea might have worked but writer Dan Perrault and director Josh Greenbaum have no idea of how to properly stretch it into a full-length narrative, instead utilizing a rambling—one might say “shaggy dog”—narrative in which virtually all the alleged humor comes from the shock value of seeing and hearing cute dogs doing things they do not normally do in movies. However, the would-be outrages are not particularly funny (unless the sight of clueless guys shaving their genitals or slipping in huge piles of dog poop—thankfully not at the same time—strike you as the epitome of droll humor) and the occasional moments of attempted pathos (such as Reggie’s gradual realization of the true nature of his relationship with his owner or a sidebar in which the dog quartet becomes involved in the search for a missing girl) fall particularly flat. There are a couple of moments where I confess to laughing (the best being an inspired cameo appearance from someone whose identity I will not reveal) but not even the most devoted dog lovers or potheads (presumably the film’s target audiences) are likely to find much to embrace in Strays, a dog of a movie that is more likely than not to put humans to sleep for once.