ABSTRACT
Most summary plotlines of Birth state that Anna, a 35-year-old woman who has been widowed for ten years, is on the point of remarrying when a boy comes to her apartment and announces that he is her former husband. In line with this précis, discussions among writers who have taken Jonathan Glazer’s film as seriously as it merits tend to have given primacy of focus to Nicole Kidman’s Anna. In privileging this character they are responding to cues latent in the text (some obvious, others less so). To mention the most obvious, the emotionally wracking predicament that afflicts the lissom widow is an inevitable source of narrative interest when a leading film star is playing that protagonist.
