Movie Info
Movie Name: Antibirth
Studio: Traverse Media
Genre(s): Horror
Release Date(s): January 25, 2016 (Sundance)/September 2, 2016 (US)
MPAA Rating: Not Rated
The glowing skin of a pregnant woman
Lou (Natasha Lyonne) lives to party. When she wakes up after a hard night and is presenting signs of pregnancy, she tries to deny it. Unfortunately, the problem can’t be ignored and the child is growing at an incredible rate. Something is wrong with the child and other women in the area have been disappearing. When Lou meets a woman named Lorna (Meg Tilly) who seems to have had a similar experience, Lou begins to seek out what happened on the night she blacked out and what could be growing inside of her.
Written and directed by Danny Perez, Antibirth is a body horror movie. The movie premiered at Sundance in 2016 and was later released in September 2016. It was met with mixed reviews.
Pretty much a typical dream
Antibirth was just on the shelf in the library and on Blu-Ray so I picked it up. The movie turned out to be a bizarre twisting story, but flaws in the script led the movie to not be very enjoyable.
The movie is about the dregs of society. Lou and her friends are drug users (and abusers) who don’t care about their jobs, their bodies, or most of the people around them. The story turns from a strange psychedelic movie about drug use to a film about government conspiracy and alien abduction. It definitely doesn’t go where you expect it to go and it doesn’t end anywhere that you can predict.
The problem with the film is that the characters of the movie are very unlikable. Natasha Lyonne, Chloë Sevigny, and Meg Tilly have always been known for their selection of edgier roles and I respect them for that. Unfortunately, this movie has poor equating unlikable. A “hooker with a heart of gold” motif wouldn’t be appropriate either, but it would be nice to be able to connect to one of the characters in the film.
Well…ok
The movie takes a Cronenberg approach. With some extreme psychedelic visuals like something like Mandy, the movie brings the body horror to the max. Lyonne’s pregnancy has her losing skin, have puss filled blisters on her feet, and a horrible birth. It is gross and definitely effective in that sense.
Antibirth is a tough movie to watch, but it isn’t necessarily because of the body horror. If nastiness of the body horror combined with people who were a bit more likable the oddity of the story would develop and build into a potential social commentary or farce of a horror film. Antibirth does surprise, but you might not like what you find.
