"Okay...let me say this. Let me say this. If I lost my wife and, uh, the next day, a little bird landed on my windowsill, looked me right in the eye, and in plain English said, "Sean, it's me, Anna. I'm back," what could I say? I guess I'd believe her. Or I'd want to. I'd be stuck with a bird. But other than that, no. I'm a man of science. I just don't believe that mumbo-jumbo. Now, that's gonna have to be the last question. I need to go running before I head home."

The music swells, flute-heavy and upbeat. The camera follows Sean as he jogs down a snow-covered path, until he comes to a sudden stop underneath a footbridge. He clutches his chest before he collapses in a heap on the ground and dies. As his eyes close to the world for the last time, a child opens his for the first, freshly born into the world.

Flash forward 10 years: Anna (Nicole Kidman) has finally pushed her dead husband to the back of her mind and agreed to marry her new beau, Joseph. At a dinner party celebrating their engagement, their friends Clifford and Clara (the always-slimy Peter Stormare and the always-batty Anne Heche) are being watched by a boy in the lobby of the apartment building. Seeing Clara leaving the building and running into the park, the boy (Cameron Bright) gives chase and observes Clara frantically burying her engagement gift to Anna.

At a birthday party for Anna's mother, the young boy finally confronts Anna with the truth: he is Anna's dead husband Sean reincarnated into the body of the boy. Dismissing it as a cruel joke, she escorts the boy out of the building. However, Sean (also the boy's name) is insistent upon seeing Anna repeatedly, telling her the most intimate details of his and Anna's relationship in the previous life. Anna decides to work with the boy in order to "break the spell" of his supposed insanity. However, who is under whose spell? Anna's growing love for a boy she believes in her heart to be her dead husband reincarnated starts to put a strain on her relationship to Joseph and the rest of her family and friends.

The first thing the viewer notices about Birth is how relatively calm it is despite its subject matter. In a worst-case scenario, it could have quickly devolved into a slobbering supernatural thriller, where Anna has to be brought back from some hellish limbo where she is imprisoned by her insane husband's ghost. Thankfully, we get exactly the opposite. There are no flashy lights, no CGI ghosts flitting across the screen, no one-liners, nothing. Instead, we are transplanted back through the years when Hollywood was reliant upon the strength of its actors rather than the size of its budget. Similar to Jimmy Stewart's convincing us of the existence of his giant rabbit friend in Harvey, Nicole Kidman convinces us that Sean is indeed reincarnated into the body of a little boy. Not to be outdone, Cameron Bright plays the confused man-in-a-child's-body with a somber intensity I've never seen out of a child actor before. He did it well in Godsend (review here), but here, he blows that performance away. After climbing into the tub with Anna and being asked what he's doing, he simply gazes at her and states matter-of-factly, "Looking at my wife." It sent a chill down my spine.

Also effective in a more disturbing sense are the psychosexual exchanges between Anna and Sean. Even though logic and law dictates that loving a ten year old boy is wrong, she still finds herself falling for him. Age and appearance doesn't matter anymore, all that matters is that the husband that was taken too soon from her has returned to her so that they can begin their life anew. When the man you love is before you, is it wrong to kiss him passionately, even if he is still in the fifth grade? Even if you take out the one graphic sex scene of the film, it still more than earns its R rating with the topics it deals with.

All of these tough topics are handled by co-writer/director Jonathan Glaser with frightening ease. His use of long, investigative shots never ceased to amaze me, especially during Anna's slow breakdown in the theatre. As the perfectly honed music (itself a stunning amalgam of woodwind-soaked orchestration and synthetic pulsation) reaches its crescendo, Anna face begins to crumple with the pain of her loss. It's a sensibility that's been shelved since the advent of the talkie, which is too bad. Emotion can be just as easily conveyed (if not more effectively) through facial expression and pantomime, and it's a damn shame more directors don't explore it without drenching it in dialogue.

Put out by Fine Line Features (a subdivision of New Line Cinema), Birth's low-budget nature shows through in its video presentation. While colors were solid and bold, the grain of cheap film stock is ever-present. However, no artifacts popped up that I saw, which was very pleasant. Audio is presented in either 5.1 or stereo, with the beautiful score (composed by Alexandre Desplat) filling in the surround channels nicely. Extras are limited to a fistful of trailers for Birth and a few other New Line releases.

From its Kubrick-modeled beginning, through its heart-squeezing middle, and all the way to the emotionally wrenching final act, there are no easy answers in Birth. Nothing is clean or well-explained, leaving the viewer drained and contemplative for a long while afterwards. However, for a film to be so provocative is definitely a good thing, and it comes highly recommended.