Jonathan Glazer's Birth is a notably cold picture. It begins in the midst of a gray New York winter and ends in a springtime not yet thawed. Likewise, the characters in the film mirror their environment; living in joyless opulence, attending parties too proper to be happy occasions and symphonies too stifling to enjoy, they seem to be frozen in place by the austerity and ritual of their social positions. They are unable to communicate, and certainly are unprepared when their icy facade inevitably begins to melt. Consider Anna (Nicole Kidman), whose husband dies in the opening scene; we catch up with her ten years later, and only over the course of the entire film does it become apparent how completely and irreparably devastated she was by his death.

That's what the film ultimately is about, I think: the effect that true love's loss can have on a person. That it takes something as drastic as the potential reincarnation of her husband to bring Anna's feeling to the surface speaks volumes about her character, which is developed in the film so subtly that viewers may not realize she has one at all. This subtlety, which works hand in hand with the aforementioned chilliness, is Glazer's triumph, but also the source of what some may see as a failure. Glazer has crafted an outstanding and very serious film out of an outlandish scenario, but so precise is his handling of it, so fragile the final product, that it is nearly impossible to embrace.

The film proceeds in movements, like a symphony - a creative decision underscored by the beautiful music accompaniment provided by Alexandre Desplat, which swells and swoons and maintains an alternatingly lush and unsettling tempo throughout long portions of the film. After the opening prelude, in which Anna's husband Shaun falls dead while jogging in Central Park, we find Anna, ten years hence, celebrating her engagement to Joseph (the always excellent Danny Huston). In the lobby of her apartment building, a ten year old boy (Cameron Bright) sits solemnly on a bench watching the guests come and go. A few days later, he lets himself into Anna's apartment and announces to her that he is Shaun. That he's back and that he loves her, and that he doesn't want her to marry Joseph. Anna's face clouds and falls when he tells her this, but she does not believe him. She does what any logical person would do; she assumes a prank has been pulled, and she marches the instigator out of her apartment.

That logic is maintained by Joseph, and Anna's socialite mother (Lauren Bacall) and by Glazer himself, who deconstructs the situation as much as possible without defusing the mystery. We learn that the boy is indeed named Shaun, and that his father lives in the apartment above Anna's; he could have feasibly learned about her husband's death through observation. But how then would he know all the details he reveals, such as that he and Anna were married thirty times in thirty days, or that they made love on her brother's couch? Thusly confounded, Anna finds that logic fails her, and in one extraordinary scene, we see her come to the realization that this must be her dead husband, and that she must still love him.

This 3 minute scene is the centerpiece of the film and is a tour de force of a performance from Kidman. It consists of one unbroken close-up of Anna's face, as she watches a symphony. There is no dialogue, but by the end of those three minutes we know exactly what she's been thinking about. Other characters are given similar moments -- Joseph spends some length of time towards the end of the film staring out a window, like Jack Torrance in The Shining -- but they are merely augmentive in purpose. Anna's close up is the crux of the film and in it, in her eyes, we see her sense of logic decay and a decade's worth of suppressed sorrow begins to surface.

This scene is the one window of opportunity Glazer provides for the audience to develop an emotional connection to Anna; it is a narrow one with limited potential, but it's there, and what a brave move it was to resist the urge to explain and simply show! Especially for as important a plot development as this. An audience could project anything they want onto a scene left as wide open as this, and that Glazer lets the film rest on it is signatory of his conviction in the material and of his belief in Kidman's talents. Because of this scene, what happens subsequently is perfectly acceptable. We believe that Anna could believe Shaun is who he says he is; that she could love him. Later, she will try to convince herself further, and justify herself in the eyes of those who cannot suspend their disbelief. Here the movie falters somewhat; characters repeat themselves often, covering the same territory in a cyclical fashion -- as they surely would in real life, but Anna's case it's mostly inconsequential after that initial moment (and despite the film's realistic tone, it is far from naturalistic). Later lengthy shots of her, as she watches Shaun as he plays on the swingset or gazes at him as he sleeps, are all about aftermath, and if you don't notice the transformation when it occurs, you might be one of those who considers the subsequent relationship a few steps shy of child porn.

It must be noted briefly that this criticism, which has been causing a minor stir since news of the scene in which Kidman and Shaun share a bath came to light, is fairly ridiculous, made by people who must be unsure of the difference between portraying something and condoning it. It would be akin to damning Nabokov for writing a book about a man who loved little girls. Or Kubrick, for making a movie about it.

Kubrick's name has surfaced twice now in this review, and it floated through my mind many more times while I was watching Birth. Glazer has professed a strong admiration for him, and I wonder if he might not have been trying to deliberately work in the master's shadow. His meticulous composition and staging, supported by the classical Desplat score, frequently recalls both The Shining and Eyes Wide Shut in style and tone. As with Kubrick, the style is realistic but not necessarily natural; everything is highly mannered, from the minute dolly moves to the dialogue delivered over the course of very long takes. And like Kubrick, Glazer tinkered with this film for a relative eternity, reworking and revising it in the editing room for more than a year after he finished shooting it. There are some unfortunate signs of this; certain characters get the short thrift, such as the boy's father (Ted Levine), who has an intriguing line about money and class before disappearing from the film completely; and there's the aforementioned portion of the film that runs close to being dullingly cyclical. I wonder how much of the original screenplay, credited to Glazer, Milo Addica (co-writer of Monster's Ball) and Jean Claude Carriere, made it to the screen. Carriere, it should be noted, was a collaborator with master surrealist Luis Bunuel late in Bunuel's career, and co-wrote classics like That Obscure Object Of Desire and The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgoise. There's very little of the surrealism or those films apparent here, and even less of their mordant humor; only one scene, in which Joseph erupts in a fury and proceeds to spank Shaun, seems to bear the tone one might've expected based on Bunuels films; indeed, black humor seems like on one of the natural ways this story could have been told, but Glazer has eschewed it almost completely.

I applaud that, and I adore the severe qualities Glazer has achieved; Birth is a masterpiece of tone, and his conviction -- and that of his cast -- carries the film. It extends even through the third act, where tricky stories like this often topple under the weight of their own premises (as in all but the most recent works of Charlie Kaufman); indeed, the solution to the mystery is more satisfying than it should be, or than it even needs to be -- because it is not until the very last scene, the suddenly wrenching aftermath of the story's crescendo, that the promise of Anna's closeup is fulfilled and the film becomes complete. If you look at this as the story of a woman who comes to believe her husband has been reincarnated, you are only seeing half of the film; you're missing the story of a woman realizing just how much she loved her husband, and how damaged her loss has left her.

Or was she damaged beforehand? We know, although we don't know if Anna knows (one must intuit more than the film has to offer if an opinion is to be made), that Shaun was not necessarily worthy of her love. That he married her 30 times in 30 days, and that he was subsequently so far from the perfect spouse she thought he was, almost makes him the most vivacious presence in the film, a very flawed and passionate man, perhaps unforgivable but certainly understandable. The boy Shaun, eternally solemn and unsmiling, bares none of these qualities, and that Anna sees her husband in him suggests an unhealthy and desperate sort of need that come full term at the end, as she wanders the beach in her wedding dress. Did she really want Shaun back? Did she lose him before he died? If you take the one fleeting opportunity Glazer offers to comprehend the film, to escape the cold, these are questions that, like the film itself, will haunt you.