Nicole Kidman is earning some of the best reviews of her career for Babygirl, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in the Main Competition section. The erotic thriller sees the 57 year-old play a tough businesswoman whose perfectly composed life threatens to fall apart as she begins an affair with his much younger male intern. Kidman, who has built a career out of risky, unpredictable roles, said that the film left her 'exposed' like never before. As the rest of the world awaits the release of Babygirl in a few months, it is perhaps best suited to go back to the Australian actor's enviable career and select a film that still haunts the daylights out of me. 

Nicole Kidman in Birth

Such a film is Birth, directed by Jonathan Glazer. As time would have it, Birth also premiered at Venice exactly two decades ago in 2004. Kidman was still the face of that confounding, bizarre film. She is still here, as adventurous and inquisitive an actor as ever, taking on films with relatively new filmmakers and submitting herself to their off-the-grid vision. Even if the film pales, Kidman is always the high point, ever present to elevate it to something undeniable.

Birth is somehow the distillation of all these features. It tells the impossible story of Anna (Kidman), who is ready to get married again after the loss of her husband Sean ten years ago. Little does she know that a 10 year-old kid slithers inside her apartment and announces that he is the husband, reincarnated. It is a ridiculous premise to begin with, whether you believe in afterlife or not. Anna also agrees, and scoffs off the little boy on their first encounter. However, he persists. ‘I am Sean,’ he tells with a firmness that is strange for a boy his age. He tells him she is committing a big mistake by marrying again. Eerily when she comes to meet him outside the park, it is the same place where Sean had died. The little boy also reveals intimate details about the family and their relationship that only they could have known.

Anna's turmoil

At the centre of this unusual crisis is Kidman, whose Anna does not want to believe what this little boy is saying. However, she chooses to confront that possibility gradually, which is first depicted in a single take sequence that tightly focuses on her face. Anna is sitting in a theatre, but her mind is somewhere else. Her face registers a gamut of feelings: hope, wonder, grief, and the shock that can this be true. It is the emotional core of this strange beast of a film, and Kidman submits to its vision with an abandon that is mesmerizing to witness. Anna begins as someone who would laugh at this thought, but in the course of the film, she is constantly in some kind of turmoil, shifting inside, fighting with herself around the possibility that her husband is back. By the end, she is not recognizable at all, culminating into that devastating final sequence by the sea.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, the actor shared her thoughts on the film, and said, "I don’t find it strange but maybe that means I’m strange. But I never found it strange. I found it profound, the way it deals with grief and how people will fill holes to explain things, needing to explain things and then being incredibly open to all possibilities when you’re in a deeply vulnerable state.”

Birth takes big swings, and might fall flat for many viewers for its utterly preposterous choices. Still, the film works as a study of faith and the lengths one would go to believe in a tangible possibility. Birth might also just work as an interrogation on community and social structures. Above all, it works as a daring confrontation on grief that never leaves. It only accumulates and gets shadowed under other feelings.

Anna's belief in Sean grows and grows, and manifests so intensely that she even dreams of the possibility of running away from him, and setting up a new life. She is willing to sacrifice her position, her entire life and face the consequences. She is willing to take a second chance at her love, that she craved so relentlessly but never received. Kidman, in a performance of ferocious power, makes all of it work.

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