Movie Reviews

[Sundance Review]: ‘birth/rebirth’ is a Bloody & Dark Thinker

Published

3 years ago

January 22, 2023

Modern-day science helps two women reanimate the dead but is it worth forgoing the natural progression of life just to maintain what they both hold dear? This is the premise of birth/rebirth (stylistically lowercase title) which premiered at Sundance this week.

Pet Sematary meets modern science in this disturbing film from director Laura Moss. Let’s throw in a soupçon of Frankenstein too, just to drive home how motivated the main characters are in this film. That’s important because instead of gravedigging and stealing brains in jars birth/rebirth’s reanimated corpses require fresh unborn fetuses and pregnant women.

Like a hospital procedural, we are introduced to Rose (Marin Ireland) a pathologist who oddly finds comfort in working on fresh corpses in the morgue. We also meet maternity nurse, Celie (Judy Reese) who, although overworked, manages to spend what little quality time she has with her adoring six-year-old daughter Lila.

Rose and Celie meet through tragedy when little Lila becomes ill and dies. Celie is frantic but level-headed even when her daughter’s corpse goes missing. This leads her to Rose’s apartment where she finds Lila, who, although not conscious, is alive.

In an info dump, Rose explains that she is able to scientifically reanimate the dead using cells from a developing fetus and its placenta. In fact, her experiment is already a success in the form of a pet pig Rose keeps and treats at her house all the while keeping meticulous records.

You’d expect Celie to be horrified at the sight of her dead daughter’s reanimated but catatonic body in a stranger’s apartment. But one of her first questions to Rose isn’t “why?” It’s how many times Lila has been turned to avoid lividity and atrophy.

Thus we embark on a bloody journey with these two women as they try to complete their shopping list of harvesting human ingredients in order to progress the experiment. It’s unclear what will happen because Rose hasn’t ever taken it this far. Lila is beginning to respond to stimuli and attempting to speak, but is this just zombie muscle memory, or is the little girl accessing free thought?

There is a lesson contained somewhere in birth/rebirth. In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it was about going mad while playing God. Here the two women appear sane even though what they do is crazy. At one point Rose sifts through her own aborted viscera to gather what she needs.

The obvious plot line motivation for Celie is how far she will go to “save” her child? But she isn’t saving her, and unlike Pet Sematary, this isn’t supernatural. This is science, not miracles.

Director Moss pushes this story quickly through the lens. She doesn’t want you to think too much about the politics until after it’s over. In the meantime, her focus is on the two leads.

Rose is a by-the-books pathologist with nary a facade of empathy. Her brain works primarily to solve scientific puzzles. She is the type of person who won’t leave a clue unanswered in a crossword even if she has to cheat to get it.

Celia acts like her henchman who literally has skin in the game. Reese plays the role with staggering empathy but with a serrated edge. If there is a possibility to bring her daughter back she’s willing to do anything for the chance and apologize later.

It isn’t like birth/rebirth is going into untapped horror territory. There are a lot of ideas inspired by other works at play. This film has a subdued uneasiness that gradually builds until it has nowhere else to go: they either succeed or don’t.

Gory but intelligent birth/rebirth is a sharp and thought-provoking nightmare with a tragedy at its core. It comes with a giant wink to horror fans who may snicker at some of its devices only to recoil when the body horror doubles down.

Unlike the steady overflow of mindless slashers that dominate our favorite entertainment mediums these days, birth/rebirth, spends most of its time cultivating a dark premise in hopes it will blow your mind later.

Shudder owns birth/rebirth, so be sure to keep an eye out for it on the streaming service.

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Movie Reviews

‘ZombieCON Vol. 1’ Gets the Con Right. The Zombies Arrive When They Want To.

Published

5 days ago

April 28, 2026

Luna Gray

ZombieCON Vol. 1 follows Rocket’s Rockets, a cosplay crew who are three-time regional anime convention champions, two of whom also wrote the film alongside their director, and it delivers a genuinely heartfelt love letter to nerd culture.

Just think Knights of Badassdom, a horror film that needs you to understand why these people care about what they care about before it can ask you to care about them. Although, I think the whole “Cosplay is lame”! Thing died out a long time ago.

The Comedy

The practical makeup effects look like the work of actual cosplayers competing, not Hollywood’s approximation of cosplayers competing, and the distinction is the difference between a film that is looking at this world from the outside and one that has been living in it.

The characters carry the specific mixture of expertise and softness that comes from living inside a somewhat shunned culture. However, ZombieCON Vol. 1 leans into that culture in a loving, non judgemental way.

The Scott Pilgrim energy in the fight staging earns its references rather than just pointing at them. The anime visual grammar is sincere, not ironic, which is the only register in which this kind of thing is actually funny. The film borrows inspiration from just about everyone but somehow manages to do it respectfully.

The Cast

Punkie Johnson came to this from Saturday Night Live, and the gap between her and the rest of the ensemble is perceptible in every scene they share. She finds the timing on lines that are still looking for their timing, lands the joke at the exact moment before the scene needs to move on, and the effect is that everything around her becomes more controlled in her presence.

Erin Áine as Claire carries the film’s stranger turns without explaining them. The character is asked to move from one kind of story into another, several times, in ways the film does not prepare you for, and Áine moves with it without telegraphing the transition or breaking register. Manny Luke’s Rocket is calibrated to produce friction from the opening scene, and Luke commits to it without softening it or winking at the audience about it.

What It Is

ZombieCON Vol. 1 has a first act that takes thirty-one minutes to produce its first zombie, a budget that shapes what the horror can do once the horror arrives, and a cast that makes both of those things survivable.

The audience for this kind of film has been burned before by entries that treat cosplay culture as the setup for a punchline. This one does not do that. It lives inside the culture rather than observing it, and the result is a horror comedy that earns the affection it is asking for even when the seams are showing.

ZombieCON Vol. 1 is free on Tubi.

Movie Reviews

‘Don’t Die’ Is a Good Friday Night Horror Film And That Is Enough.

Published

6 days ago

April 27, 2026

Luna Gray

Don’t Die hits UK digital April 27 via Miracle Media. Benjamin Stark wrote and directed it. It played Panic Fest 2024 and spent the better part of two years making the quiet festival rounds, waiting for the right audience to find it. That audience is you.

What Happens

Jenks, played by Theodus Crane, needs medication he cannot afford. He breaks into a small-town pharmacy after hours. This was supposed to be clean. Nobody was supposed to be there. The pharmacist, Julia, played by Virginia Newcomb, was working late. She gets shot. Not knowing what else to do, Jenks takes her exactly where she tells him to take her.

This turns out to be a remote cabin run by a small collective quietly distributing medication to people who cannot access it through legal channels. The Robin Hood framing is warm, and the film offers it genuinely before slowly removing the warmth.

The Turn

The group running the cabin is not irrational. They believe what they are doing matters. They believe the math is simple. People need blood and organs, medication costs money, two strangers showed up and nobody outside knows where they are. Jenks figures out what that math adds up to about two minutes before the film shows it explicitly, and Crane plays the moment of comprehension exactly right. Quiet. Still. The kind of fear that does not move.

Stark earns the horror here because the people doing terrible things are not doing them out of cruelty. They have a system. They have a purpose. No villain monologue. No sadistic speech. They are calm and businesslike about it. That calm is what makes the third act work. Horror is rarely as effective as when the threat makes a kind of sense.

The Cast

Crane carries it. He plays Jenks as a man who keeps choosing decency as the available options narrow, and that consistency is what makes the back half hit as hard as it does. The performance never reaches for sympathy. It does not need to.

Newcomb as Julia is the other weight-bearing wall. She has the harder job. Her character moves from victim to something more complicated without the script telegraphing the shift. She handles it without calling attention to the handling.

Joshua Burge rounds out the central trio as Randy, the friend who shows up when needed and clocks the situation faster than any reasonable person should. If you don’t have a Randy in your life, make sure to get one.

What It Is and Is Not

Don’t Die was marketed as horror. It earns the label by the end, but it arrives there through crime thriller territory, and the patience of the first two acts is deliberate and correct. The tension builds quietly. When the horror finally arrives it lands harder because of the time spent getting there.

The budget limitations are present and real. Small locations, a tight cast, minimal spectacle. Stark works within them rather than against them, and for the most part it does not show. The pacing stumbles in the back half, running about five minutes longer than it should in the wrong places. There are moments where the momentum stalls. Neither is fatal.

It does not have much to say about healthcare beyond using it as a mechanism for the plot. That is fine. Not every film needs a thesis. This one tells a good story, maintains tension across most of its runtime, delivers a few genuine scares, and knows exactly what it is. Most low-budget horror manages one of those things.

Don’t Die is on UK digital now. Good Friday night film.

Movie Reviews

Content Is Now on Digital. Watch It Twice.

Published

6 days ago

April 27, 2026

Luna Gray

Content, Adam Meilech’s screenlife horror satire, arrives on UK digital April 27 via GrimmVision following a strong festival run that included Grimmfest 2025. The whole film plays out across phones and laptop screens. It opens on a sham. It ends somewhere you did not expect to go.

What It Is

The opening scene drops you inside Therapals, a fake online therapy platform where the therapists are just untrained people trying to earn a paycheck. The first patient our protagonist connects with has the energy of an angry Ryan Reynolds and, with complete calm, tells her he is thinking about killing his neighbor.

From there Meilech begins stacking story on top of story in a way that will either lose you or thrill you, and which one depends entirely on your tolerance for the extremely meta. At the center is AJ, played by Meilech himself: actor, writer, director, stalker, kidnapper, psychopath.

While there is a clear line to be drawn from Content and Milk & Serial, Meilech provides a wonderful villain. His polite swagger and genuine enthusiasm make one of the most powerfuly wicked online personas I have seen in a while.

The Cast and the Method

The cast is Megan Boehmcke, Alex Mills, and Vaune Suitt alongside Meilech, operating under conditions that range from unpleasant to genuinely alarming. AJ records himself playing therapist to himself and plays the recordings back. He pays a stranger to pose as a mentor figure for his male actor, who believes he is in on a bit the whole time. He performs takes over and over in the Kubrick tradition until he gets what he wants. Eventually he just moves his lead into his apartment.

To get a real reaction during a shoot, he shows up and actually hits the actor. The poor actor, still in the scene, asks if they can reshoot. This dude is so desperate for a part, he is willing to show he can make his pain more entertaining.

Where It Sits

The several story arcs running at once can be genuinely hard to follow and Content is not interested in making things easier. That is a feature, not a flaw. The bad guy is normal looking. He lives in a shared apartment. He does not signal his intentions in any way that would help you see it coming. There is real secondhand cringe to watching private moments captured without the subjects knowing, which is the film’s most effective trick, and Meilech commits to it completely.

It lands somewhere between Milk and Serial and Creep in the first half, and ends up closer to Funny Games meets Better Watch Out by the final act. That is an unusual place to land. It is also exactly the right one. Content is available now on UK digital via GrimmVision.