BORN AGAIN, UNNATURALLY

REVIEWED - BIRTH: For much of this triumphantly eerie mood piece, the camera lurks like some malign crawling entity beneath the characters' eyelines, looking up at them ever so patiently - the picture features some extravagantly long takes, writes Donald Clarke.

Meanwhile, Alexandre Desplat's faultless score alternates between playfully melodic trills and sombre retorts on the timpani to create a singularly disconcerting ambience.

No film in recent years has fashioned a more accommodating environment for ghostly visitations. But Birth, in which a pixie-haired Nicole Kidman believes a young boy to be possessed with the soul of her dead husband, is something more than a belated Hallowe'en shocker.

The key to making sense (or, perhaps, to understanding why no sense can be made) of the picture comes with the knowledge that one of its writers, Jean-Claude Carrière, was a frequent collaborator with the late Luis Buñuel. Set largely in an exclusive apartment building in uptown Manhattan (echoes of Rosemary's Baby here), this unique entertainment is as much a work of surrealism as a horror film. Like many of Buñuel's films, it enjoys deflating bourgeois complacency by introducing elements of the absurd into otherwise tightly disciplined lives.

Birth begins with a magnificent tracking shot following the heroine's husband round a snowbound Central Park as he jogs himself towards a heart attack. We then move forward several years to find the glacial widow, Anna, preparing to announce her engagement to the equally contained Joseph (Danny Huston). In the aftermath of the party a round-faced boy (Cameron Bright) approaches Anna and tells her that he is Sean.

This is indeed his name, but it is also that of the late jogger, and the child knows things about Anna that only a husband could know. Paying no heed to the cynical dismissals of her terrifying mother (Lauren Bacall), Anna begins to entertain notions of running away with the boy.

Much has already been written about the scene in which Sean climbs into a bath with Anna. Bright's parents and director Jonathan Glazer must answer for any stress the young man may have undergone, but it cannot be denied that such sequences create a deliciously discomforting sense of unease. That unhealthy, sour atmosphere spreads over every frame of this visually sumptuous picture. Credit is due to Kidman, always at her best when at her least human, to Glazer, whose Sexy Beast promised so much, and to cinematographer Harris Savides, the brains behind the sleepy look of Gus Van Sant's Elephant.

Sadly, the film does go a little awry in its final quarter when, unnecessarily and unconvincingly, the script suggests that there may be a rational explanation for all that has gone before. Somehow I couldn't imagine Buñuel wearing such a compromise.