Danny Perez's Antibirth introduces a world full of depravity through the lens of a small, impoverished town in Michigan full of disenfranchised youth and drug-addled veterans, in what feels like a desolate place at the edge of the world. Lou and her friend, Sadie, live their lives one pot hit at a time, living a debaucherous lifestyle full of drugs, sex and bad decisions. One morning, Lou wakes up after a wild night of partying to symptoms of pregnancy, feeling uneasy and struggling to stay away from the toilet bowl rim. These symptoms are coupled with the fact that Lea has begun to have bizarre, reoccurring visions making her newfound illness as mysterious as it is painful. Danny Perez's Antibirth is an absurdist horror treat, a film that is perhaps best described as body horror meets drug film, using the stigma of unwanted pregnancy to fuel this subversive, offbeat tale. Antibirth is a film that shows little interest in coherence early on, throwing the viewer into this sleazy, debaucherous world, one in where strange happenings are admist but the viewer is left just as much in the dark as the inebriated protagonist. Antibirth goes out of its way to be bizarre, ambiguous, and confrontational, showing a certain glee in its subversive brand of horror that bring a lot of avant garde elements to the table. The ramshackle nature of this film makes it hard to decipher the supernatural from the hallucinatory, with Lou's dazed psyche and overall state of confusion making the whole film a strangely lovable experience. While it's far from a deal breaker, I do wish the film would have been more excessive with its gore and violence, matching the same gleeful amount of sleaze and depravity the film thrives on. A singular horror film that blends body horror with drug comedy, Antibirth is a bizarre, hallucinatory horror film that should be enjoyed by the more adventurous filmgoer.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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