A new horror film, Birth/Rebirth, directed by Laura Moss, takes on the darker sides of child-rearing with a twisted and queasily clinical approach, as the film recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. Marin Ireland plays a pathologist named Rose, who becomes obsessed with using science to bring a dead child back to life. The film explores the themes of birth, death, and the way beyond. The Hollywood Reporter writes that Birth/Rebirth is not for the faint of heart and takes cues from classic horror films such as Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator, Dracula, and Frankenstein in its grisly portrayal of two women who resurrect a little girl’s corpse in the name of science and love.

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The story begins with a painful and problematic labor scene in which a midwife, Celie (Judy Reyes), cannot save the life of a first-time mother’s child. The child’s corpse ends up in the pathology lab, where the obsessive and prickly Rose is tasked with cleaning up the mess.

Rose is a woman who prefers dissecting bodies over talking to actual living people, but there’s more to her than just her icy antisocial behavior. She’s up to some strange things in the lab, taking home human tissue samples and other specimens, which she uses to concoct mixtures that she then injects into her pet pig. When Celie’s 6-year-old daughter, Lila, contracts a fatal case of bacterial meningitis, Rose sees an opportunity to take her experiments to the next level. She convinces Celie to let her use Lila’s corpse for her twisted experiments, promising to bring the girl back to life.

Marin Ireland has had notable roles in shows such as Homeland, The Blacklist, and Sneaky Pete and films such as 28 Hotel Rooms and Killing Them Softly. She garnered a Critics’ Choice Television Award nomination for her role in The Blacklist.

Birth/Rebirth is a Metaphor for Women’s Physical Transformations

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While Birth/Rebirth is a horror film, it is also a twisted metaphor for motherhood. The film’s gruesome portrayal of the medical procedures and transformations that female bodies undergo during pregnancy is intended to channel the loss that women can experience afterward.

The film uses the placenta, plasma, and other biological materials to keep the child’s corpse alive. This leads to increasingly desperate and gruesome measures, as Rose and Celie resort to stealing samples from pregnant patients in the hospital. Birth/Rebirth will be released on the horror streaming platform Shudder.