Mysterious ‘Birth’ mesmerizes with its strange story

Strange, miraculous and clear-eyed about how grief and hope intertwine, “Birth” is hypnotic.

I mean that almost literally. The movie got under my skin and stayed there to the extent that, after I saw it, it woke me in the middle of the night and I couldn’t get back to sleep because so many of its ideas were racing through my brain.

With its story of Anna, a woman (Nicole Kidman) who becomes convinced that a 10-year-old is the reincarnation of her late husband, “Birth” puts us in an uncomfortable place. But it’s a great place for the movies to take us, since we’re most likely to figure things out when we question what we believe to be true.

Setting and mood are more important to “Birth” than the mystery of whether the boy is legit. Anna lives with her mother (Lauren Bacall) and other family members in a Central Park apartment so insular and plush it feels like a foreign country.

The movie is extremely class-conscious (the boy comes from a working-class family), and there’s a sense that the velvety comfort of Kidman’s life is a cocoon. It’s a shelter that keeps her safe and, paradoxically, also makes her vulnerable, since her family’s efforts to ignore her grief make her susceptible to the child, whose outrageous claims begin to make sense.

The key scene for expressing Anna’s vulnerability is a close-up as she listens to an opera. The only art form that can use close-ups is the movies, where they provide a unique invitation to explore a character. Here, Kidman listens, and the camera stays on her puzzled face for nearly two minutes, telling us this is a life-changing moment and inviting us to guess what she’s thinking.

There are many, similar gaps in “Birth”: characters we’re never introduced to, puzzling behavior that is never explained, music that’s at odds with the action it underscores. “What,” we keep asking ourselves, “am I missing?”

Aided by Kidman’s quietly desperate performance, director Jonathan Glazer has constructed the film to bring us into intimate contact with what is missing in Anna’s smugly perfect life. Together, Glazer and Kidman reveal how full Anna’s life is. And how empty.