Birth (2004)

This was a weird one. I leave Sarah to her own devices, free movies from the library, and she comes home with some strange choices.

The basic premise, as the box will tell you, is that this woman believes this 10 year old boy is the reincarnation of her dead husband. Nicole Kidman does an awesome job of making this believable, but it doesn’t change the fact of how creepy this movie gets when she starts to fall in love with this little boy. So not only does it make me nervous from some weird perversion, I also have to put aside my problems with the ideas of reincarnation, which isn’t at all possible when it comes to the beliefs of Christianity.

The movie is filled with long, dramatic, pauuuusessss. Music sets the mood and reactions further the disbeliefs that all of the main characters have when this little boy starts to reveal facts that only the dead husband would know. But through the whole movie, you wait in anticipation of some sort of payoff, but it never comes. Things seem to be a little unresolved. Kidman falls for the little boy, she believes that it is really her husband, and you wonder how the movie is going to end.

Then, one character, his apparent lover, throws a wrench in the picture. He denies he is who he said he was, and Kidman marries another man, ending the movie in some crazy dramatic event where she seems to be on the verge of suicide. Does the boy lie, saying he isn’t the husband because of this alleged affair with another woman he was having, that this would cause problems later if he went through with everything? Does kidman go wacko because she knows deep down it is him and feels like she’s lost him again? Does she try to kill herself on the beach, where they met to be with him in another life? You see what I mean, I don’t really know, there is no resolution, and you sort of care during the course of the movie, but you sort of don’t.

I wouldn’t recommend this movie to many people. Only if you like things that are a weird and something you’ve never seen before would you want to check this out. Which as I find as I grow older, includes me at times. If I have to research the meaning of a movie after it is over, that may mean I sort of liked it.

Here are some similar arcade posts

• The Interpreter (2005)
• Man on Fire (2004)
• Shall We Dance (2004)
• The Shipping News (2001)
• Girl With The Pearl Earring (2003)

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