3.5 Out of 5 Stars
The best way to describe Antibirth the feature length debut by Philadelphia filmmaker Danny Perez is, what if a young David Cronenberg made a buddy comedy about a woman blacking out at a party and waking up pregnant without having slept with anyone. The film will be screening Saturday night at the International House hosted by local director Danny Perez who will also be on hand for what should be a very interesting Q&A afterwards. Antibirth pairs 90s indie darlings Natasha Lyonne and Chloë Sevigny in a cinematic concoction that somehow blends body horror, alien invasion paranoia and creepy kid’s mascots into a nightmarish vision of rural dystopian life.

Antibirth follows Lou (Natasha Lyonne) and Sadie (Chloë Sevigny) two party girl BFFs who live in a desolate Michigan community plagued by abductions, where ex-marines control the vices of its inhabitants. After getting separated from Sadie at one particularly wild party, Lou thinks someone may have slipped something into her normal cocktail of drugs and alcohol when she wakes up the next morning and can’t account for how she got home. As Lou starts to display the symptoms of an advanced pregnancy we soon meet Lorna (Meg Tilly) a conspiracy nut and military vet that helps Lou to understand there are much more sinister forces at work in the tiny town around her.


For me, it’s the subtle complexity of the dysfunctional friendship between Natasha Lyonne and Chloë Sevigny and how their flawed characters deal with the darker subtexts of the film that really makes Antibirth work. While being a bit rough around the edges, Antibirth’s blending of genres works to its advantage, especially in how it manages to tie all of these influences together in its epic third and final act. It is here Danny Perez builds up and brings the script home infusing his background in experimental film into a climax that easily delivers one of this year’s greatest WTF moments in cinema.

While everyone in genre seems to be romanticizing the 80’s, Antibirth feels like it was plucked from the 90s with a solid debt not only to Cronenberg and The X-Files but Gregg Araki’s Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy. Antibirth works on many different levels thanks to Danny Perez’s visual style and the performances Lyonne and Sevigny that are this film’s true redemption. It’s these two women and their empowering approach to the material that takes a script that could have easily been reduced simple camp and gives it a real weight and depth. Antibirth is film that through the sum of its parts proves its earned its last fifteen minutes that will not doubt burn itself into your retinas forever.