(Semi-spoilers.) Here's
an oddly unsettling movie that slipped through the cracks and into instant
obscurity, though it remains readily available as one of the many unknown movies
floating about on Netfux that nobody
ever watches (or at least nobody we know). Possibly an unjust fate, for though
we ourselves still cannot decide whether we liked Rebirth or hated it, we have to admit that we haven't been able to
simply forget the movie and find our thoughts wandering back to it time and
again, questioning less how the movie resolves itself than how we might react
if we found ourselves in a similar situation. In that sense, Rebirth has a resonance that far
outlasts many another movie that easily and quickly gets a "Like".
And lasting resonance is a noteworthy quality, to say the least, for how often
does a movie truly make you think and consider?
Contemplation on
how we would react is probably moot, however, for not only do we have neither
a family nor a 9-to-5 grind suffocating us with monotony, but even when we did have
the latter of the two we tended to abuse it more that it abused us (which may
be why we always tended to lose all our 9-to-5s).
Furthermore, were any of our long-lost, past best friends from any given previous stage of our life to suddenly show up and use a fake "Your kid/wife/puppy dog/kitty is in the hospital" call to instigate a surprise reunion, and then blow endless hot air about how some weekend program has changed his life and how we have to do it, too, we would write the dude or dudette off as a definite ex-friend, like any other past friend who went Scientologist, was born again, found Trump or the AfD (generally, in Germany, they tend to like both and also claim that the Jews started both World Wars), or lost themselves to heroin or meth or hardcore alcoholism (the last, we assume, will be what one day drives all our current friends to ignore us on the street).
But Kyle (Fran Kanz of Cabin in the Woods [2011 / trailer], Bloodsucking Bastards [2015 / trailer] and You Might Be the Killer [2018 / trailer]), the figure of identification of Rebirth, is not us: his wife Mary (Kat Foster) might be hot and they might still have occasional sex despite a button-cute daughter, but his home life and an unfulfilling but safe and obviously well-paying Dilbert-like 9-to-5er bank job leave him feeling empty and unsatisfied and in a rut. So when his old best bud Zack (Adam Goldberg of Dazed & Confused [1993 / trailer], The Prophecy [1995 / trailer], Stay Alive [2006 / trailer], From Within [2008 / trailer] and Miss Nobody [2010 / trailer]), who dropped off the face of the earth a few years earlier, suddenly shows up with a free ticket to a Rebirth weekend, his initial reluctance to break routine slowly crumbles and he suddenly takes the jump — straight into a bottomless rabbit hole of nightmarish confrontations in what can only be described as a self-improvement retreat from hell.
Furthermore, were any of our long-lost, past best friends from any given previous stage of our life to suddenly show up and use a fake "Your kid/wife/puppy dog/kitty is in the hospital" call to instigate a surprise reunion, and then blow endless hot air about how some weekend program has changed his life and how we have to do it, too, we would write the dude or dudette off as a definite ex-friend, like any other past friend who went Scientologist, was born again, found Trump or the AfD (generally, in Germany, they tend to like both and also claim that the Jews started both World Wars), or lost themselves to heroin or meth or hardcore alcoholism (the last, we assume, will be what one day drives all our current friends to ignore us on the street).
But Kyle (Fran Kanz of Cabin in the Woods [2011 / trailer], Bloodsucking Bastards [2015 / trailer] and You Might Be the Killer [2018 / trailer]), the figure of identification of Rebirth, is not us: his wife Mary (Kat Foster) might be hot and they might still have occasional sex despite a button-cute daughter, but his home life and an unfulfilling but safe and obviously well-paying Dilbert-like 9-to-5er bank job leave him feeling empty and unsatisfied and in a rut. So when his old best bud Zack (Adam Goldberg of Dazed & Confused [1993 / trailer], The Prophecy [1995 / trailer], Stay Alive [2006 / trailer], From Within [2008 / trailer] and Miss Nobody [2010 / trailer]), who dropped off the face of the earth a few years earlier, suddenly shows up with a free ticket to a Rebirth weekend, his initial reluctance to break routine slowly crumbles and he suddenly takes the jump — straight into a bottomless rabbit hole of nightmarish confrontations in what can only be described as a self-improvement retreat from hell.
Kyle is not
exactly an easy protagonist to root for. Aside from the fact that he seems to
wallow in dissatisfaction (he seems to totally lack any interests, and
interests are the key to a happy life), he is also a bit of a wet rag. That
there's more to him than meets the eyes is revealed, however, in the
follow-the-clues segment where he finds his way to the Rebirth bus… at which
point he once again becomes a testicle-less wet rag, at least until he is
pushed too far and feels he must fight for his life and escape.
But a friend in
need is a friend indeed. And Kyle is a friend indeed: having finally found the
way out, he is confronted with the fact that his former best bud, the Rebirth über-fan Zack, is also somewhere in the building, so instead of being Elvis and
leaving the building, Kyle decides that he just can't leave the loser behind,
thus re-entering the rabbit hole to hell. (Guess he never had a friend who
became an addict — then he would have known: you can't trust a junkie…
especially an intelligent one.)
Perhaps the main
reason we have problems with the movie is that for most of Rebirth, even if we are able to swallow Kyle's decision to take
part in a questionable weekend program, he is simply a difficult person to like:
a dull, chronically supercilious yuppie whose sad-sack self pity and wimpiness is
unbearable. Once he develops testicles, however, he becomes one to root for,
even if he seems to take one wrong turn after the other…
As for the
ending, there are two twists, and they do hold a cynical punch but cannot be
discussed without going full Spoiler! Let us just say, however,
that considering how big Kyle's balls were by the end of Rebirth Hell, he lost
them pretty quickly again back at his home after the implied Jim Jones Kool-aid
and appearance of "evidence". Once a wimp, always a wimp — though the
final scenes intercut with the credits do redeem the movie and add a second
punch to the resolution. In the end, however, we would argue that in Rebirth, Kyle basically traded off one
form of zombiedom for another form of zombiedom… one which, like Hotel California,
he can never leave.
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