Good morning, House of Madness residents:
If you had an opportunity to play God, would you pounce at the chance, or would you prefer to let nature run its course? Say you could erase that breakfast burrito you doused with extra hot sauce that's causing literal flames to torch out your ass cheeks, would you have a bowl of Rice Krispies instead, or would you take the burning bombardment you deserve? What if you could eradicate all the debt you've accumulated through buying endless amounts of worthless action figures - would you reset your bank account, or would you continue to drown in your plasticized nightmare? The stakes here may be low, but Dr. Rose Casper (Marin Ireland) is playing for keeps.
Celie Morales (Judy Reyes) is a nurse stuck working long hours with little time for anything else, while trying her best to make ends meet in order to raise her young daughter Lila (A.J. Lister) as a single mother. One morning as Celia is getting ready for work, Lila finds she isn't feeling well, so Celia is forced to leave Lila in the care of her neighbour while she heads off to work. As the workday drags on, Celia is struggling to juggle her work life and her home life, yet she has no idea the horror that awaits her when she gets home, as her cell phone craps out and leaves her in the dark to all the outside world's happenings. Once she arrives home, she sees a note that her daughter had to be rushed to the hospital as her illness intensified, but by the time she arrives, little Lila is already dead.
Or is she? When the hospital informs Celia that they seem to have 'misplaced' Lila's body, Celia becomes more and more suspicious of Dr. Casper's antics, and one day follows her home to her apartment to make a grizzly discovery: little Lila isn't dead after all; well she was, but Dr. Casper has been working on a serum that reanimates living organisms, and her formerly deceased experimental pig Muriel that wanders around her apartment is living proof that her experiment was worthy of reaching the next level, and a human host was the next in line. As the two women work tirelessly to keep Lila alive with vastly different agendas, they have to cope with endless hurdles and will seemingly stop at nothing in order to keep the young girl in the land of the living, but is there a line? How far is too far, and what happens when they get there?
"Birth/Rebirth" is a disturbing film that makes us wonder how far we'd be willing to go for someone or something we really love, no matter what the consequences. It's easy to judge someone else in their own personal plight, but what if that was you or your daughter, would you simply let her slip through the fingers of time, or would you intervene and do whatever it took to keep her alive and well? Some decisions weren't meant to be made, for given the opportunity, who knows what we'd choose.
Madness Meter: 6.5/10
NB
