It’s the score that hooks you first in Birth: that light, sprightly, slightly anxious jitter of woodwind that trills over the film’s opening shot, as the camera tracks a man’s morning run through a snow-carpeted Central Park. For a while, the music follows the pace of his movement, lending this ordinary activity an otherworldly lilt – the whitened trees and paths of New York’s great green lung taking on the air of Grimm Brothers woodland.
But heavier orchestral intrusions threaten this rhythmic coordination between sound and image. Battering brass and percussion take over as the runner stalls, collapses and dies under Greyshot Arch; as we discordantly cut to shimmery footage of a water birth, the flute section picks up where it left off. Just four minutes into Jonathan Glazer’s brilliant, prismatic second film, one spell has been broken, and another perhaps already cast.
