I t’s the score that hooks you first in Birth: that light, sprightly, slightly anxious jitter of woodwind that trills over the film’s opening shot, as the camera tracks a man’s morning run through a snow-carpeted Central Park. For a while, the music follows the pace of his movement, lending this ordinary activity an otherworldly lilt – the whitened trees and paths of New York’s great green lung taking on the air of Grimm Brothers woodland. But heavier orchestral intrusions threaten this rhythmic coordination between sound and image.
Battering brass and percussion take over as the runner stalls, collapses and dies under Greyshot Arch; as we discordantly cut to shimmery footage of a water birth, the flute section picks up where it left off. Just four minutes into Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant, prismatic second film, one spell has been broken, and another perhaps already cast. That editorial juxtaposition of a man’s death and a baby’s arrival – following a faceless introductory voiceover by the deceased, musing on reincarnation and his scepticism over the idea – is about as pointedly literal as things get in Birth, a metaphysical love story that proceeds to be both lucidly simple and richly, eerily elusive, in which everything is explained and nothing quite makes sense.
A full decade after the events of that lyrically haunting prologue, Nicole Kidman’s brittle Manhattan widow Anna has accepted another marriage proposal; soon afterwards, she’s confronted by .
