“And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper,” Mary Shelley wrote in the foreword to the 1815 reprint of Frankenstein. Shelley had a fraught relationship with motherhood: her own mother, the feminist author Mary Wollstonecraft, died from complications during childbirth. While waiting for the midwife on August 30th, 1797, Wollstonecraft scribbled a loaded note to her husband: “I have no doubt of seeing the animal today.”
Shelley would endure multiple miscarriages and the loss of three children in infancy. She was pregnant for most of the writing of her masterpiece, a period during which she was also grieving the death of her firstborn daughter, Clara. Her fictional monster arrives, by Victor Frankenstein’s account, after “days and nights of incredible labour and fatigue”.
These twin themes of monstrosity and creation continue to inspire movies as disparate as Re-Animator, Blade Runner and, now, Birth/Rebirth, the terrific feature debut from Laura Moss.
“I think it took a long time for me to realise how much my film was a mash-up of Frankenstein the novel and everything I learned about Mary Shelley’s life,” says Moss. “I love the novel because of the scope and ambition of it. For me, it exceeds other classic novels I’ve read by women of the time. So I became interested in Mary Shelley, and her history of grief and miscarriage, the loss of her mother, and the overwhelming shadow of her mother, who was herself a feminist icon fascinated me. I’d love to take credit for it and say there was a deliberate attempt to weave Mary Shelley into the story. But I think it was subliminal. Rose, the main character, kind of came to me as a what-if question. What if Frankenstein were a woman and had to use her body in order to create things?”
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Birth/Rebirth brings together two very different women in a macabre maternal partnership. Celie, a harried obstetrics nurse and single mother played by Judy Reyes, loses her young daughter, Lila, to bacterial meningitis only to discover that, between the hospital and the morgue, the little girl’s body has gone missing. A frantic search leads her to Rose, a frosty pathologist and DIY-mad scientist played by Marin Ireland, who has snatched Lila’s body and reanimated her using a homemade serum that requires random hook-ups and routine pregnancy termination. When this line of experimentation becomes untenable, the mismatched coparents go to increasingly desperate lengths to keep Lila alive, sometimes with Cocomelon playing in the background.
“Rose has an uncomfortable relationship with her body, and that particular mindset is pretty personal to me,” says Moss, who is nonbinary. “She wants to treat her like a vending machine. Basically, she wants to create something with her mind, but she is forced to reckon with her body in order to do so. She treats it well, like a machine that she wants to run properly, but when it doesn’t do what she wants to do it kind of breaks her.
“I think that that’s an experience that a lot of people with uteruses can relate to. I know that for me going through different phases of life informed the writing and the creation of the film. I turned 40 on the set of this movie, and I feel if there’s a target audience for this film, it’s people in their late 30s or early 40s reckoning with and seeing the end of their reproductive years on the horizon.”
As an undergraduate studying theatre and design at New York University, Moss was evacuated during 9/11, an experience that inspired her to relocate to Egypt and then the West Bank, where she worked as an emergency medical technician for the Red Crescent.
“I think that helped me put the arts in context,” says Moss. “I’ve always been an artist in some way, shape or form. I went to a vocational high school to study music. Then I was going to be an actor for about a minute. But 9/11 was really disillusioning for me as an artist. I thought, ‘Oh, I want to develop practical skills that I can use, that can actually help people.’ The idea of healing through the arts felt like an indulgence to me. And it wasn’t until I went through that process, and was working as an EMT, that I realised – even though I was passionate about it – it really wasn’t my calling. That allowed me to return to the arts and understand its value. I don’t believe that artists are the same thing as first responders, but I do believe we serve an important role in society.”
When Moss returned to New York, her stressful experiences on the frontlines proved useful training for the fraught, low-budget production of Rising Up: The Story of the Zombie Rights Movement, her award-winning short film from 2009. She has subsequently directed seven more shorts, plus an episode of Neurotica for TV, and worked as a production designer on more than a dozen projects. Birth/Rebirth has had a long, carefully considered gestation.
“It’s incredibly challenging for a first-time feature director to get any film made, and this one is not an easy sell,” says Moss. “My experiences at Sundance helped me to stay true to the essence of the film, because the easiest route to get a movie with horror features made is to lean into the horror and emphasise jump-scares and speak the language of the genre. That is not this film’s character. It. So I had to be patient. I had to be really articulate about the kind of movie I wanted to make. And I had to seek out partners that wanted to make the same film as I did.”
Those partners include Brendan J O’Brien, her former husband and long-time cowriter, whom Moss first met while she was studying at Trinity College Dublin and he was in a programme at University College Dublin.
“It’s funny being nonbinary, because it makes the space that is designed to advance women in film less comfortable,” says Moss. “And yet you’re still facing the discrimination that exists against women in the film industry. Collaboration is an invaluable defence. Brendan O’Brien is a rock for me. So is Mali Elfman, my lead producer. Those relationships are crucial in terms of succeeding when you’re an under-represented film-maker, because you’re constantly pushing against the current of the industry. If you do that alone, it inevitably wears you down. I will not make another movie without them if I can possibly help it.”
Laura Moss will attend the Irish premiere of Birth/Rebirth as part of the Still Voices Film Festival, which runs from Wednesday, November 15th, to Sunday, November 19th
