It’s been suggested that Nicole Kidman chopped her locks off in Birth as some sort of homage to Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. Jonathan Glazer’s sophomore feature has all the trimmings of the Polanski film – New York apartment dwellings, scary little people, Euro sensibilities – and yet the reason for Kidman's elfish hairdo isn’t to further intertextualise things, but rather simply, to allow us to see more of her face. And Glazer’s clearly obsessed with her features, pausing orchestrally at one point to lock the camera on her noggin and literally squeeze and twist every pore of expression out of her, until it seems as if the very sides of the frame implode around her.

The scene is akin to that of the Death Star garbage compactor piece in Star Wars: high tension, despair, pandemonium, walls closing in. Of course, that all those things are vacuumed into a series of eye flutters and facial twitches is pretty amazing, and going by the cliché, it’s a close-up worth a thousand words. The film accounts for adult Sean being reincarnated as 10-year-old Sean, who then tries to convince wife Anna – now due to be remarried – that he’s her dead husband. Whether there’s any truth to this is debatable, however everything’s encased in a varnished Manhattan veneer that acts like a secular fortress, validating the scepticism and disbelief at hand for both the characters in the film, and all those viewing it. That Glazer never abandons his post and goes all Cacoon on us is headstrong, considering that afterlife/resurrection poses lofty questions that needn’t be approached. Whatever controversy there was about Kidman lathering up some kid in a bathtub and ramming her tongue down his throat should be ignored (it’s really nothing at all), and its treatment speaks for the film overall as a carefully tuned, sensitive beast.—TW