OxfordPress.com

Grade: B-

Verdict: A beguiling murk of sights and sounds that don't make much sense.

By BOB TOWNSEND
Cox News Service

Director Jonathan Glazer's "Birth" is a frustrating film. Shot in lyrical shades of snow and shadows, its minimalist visual style, set to Alexandre Desplat's surging orchestral score, is strangely mesmerizing. And its flurries of forceful performances range from gutsy to creepy to wry.

But the look and the acting don't matter as much as they could because "Birth" gets bogged down by a premise and a script that turn out to be more titillating than clever.

Nicole Kidman plays Anna, an Upper East Side New Yorker who comes to believe that a 10-year-old boy named Sean, played by Cameron Bright ("Godsend"), is the reincarnation of her late husband -- who was also named Sean and died of a heart attack 10 years earlier while jogging in Central Park.

The sullen young Sean appears one evening at a birthday party for Anna's mother (Lauren Becall), where Joseph (Danny Huston) has just announced that he and Anna are to be married. "Well done, Joseph," declares the icy matriarch. But, whoever he is, Sean has other ideas. "You're my wife," he tells Anna. "Don't marry Joseph."

At first, everyone treats Sean's sudden arrival as a cruel hoax. "How often does somebody come along claiming to be somebody who is dead?" asks Anna amid nervous laughter. And yet Sean knows all sorts of intimate details, not only about Anna, but about her whole eccentric, upper crust clan.

Needless to say, things soon get tense between Sean and Joseph. In one the film's strongest scenes, the two taunt each other during a posh chamber music recital at the family's apartment, until Joseph finally goes berserk and literally takes Sean over his knee.

The commotion lurking inside and outside "Birth" is the relationship between Kidman's woman Anna and Bright's boy Sean -- who, among other things, share a cozy horse-drawn carriage ride through the park and sit together naked in the bathtub. At one point, Anna even asks, "How are you going to satisfy my needs?" To which Sean answers, "I know what you're talking about."

Can you say Mary Kay Letourneau?

But icky as some viewers may find it, the taboo turns out to be the film's greatest strength. Take out the tired reincarnation stuff and make it all about lunacy and forbidden love, and you have something much more compelling, if even more controversial. In fact, without giving away the ending, that's what Glazer (whose better, brasher first film was "Sexy Beast") finally settles on. But it's too late by then.