127 min | R | December 30, 2020 | Netflix
A home birth goes wrong. A woman loses her newborn daughter and spends the next year refusing to grieve the way everyone around her demands. Vanessa Kirby holds the whole thing together by shutting down.
Martha Weiss plans a home birth with her partner Sean. The midwife they expected does not come. A substitute named Eva arrives, the labor turns, and the baby dies. The rest of the film tracks Martha through a year of grief that nobody in her life will let her process on her own terms. It is a film about the gap between private loss and the public performance everyone expects of the bereaved.
Vanessa Kirby plays Martha as a woman who goes inward while her family demands she lash out. She holds her face still while her body keeps reacting, and the control is the point. Shia LaBeouf plays Sean as a man whose grief curdles into resentment and worse. Ellen Burstyn plays Elizabeth, Martha’s mother, who weaponizes her own survival story to force her daughter into a lawsuit. The dinner-table confrontation between Kirby and Burstyn is the second-best scene in the film, and both actors earn it.
Kornél Mundruczó opens with an unbroken take that runs close to half an hour. The camera follows Martha through the labor in real time, and the technique strips away the safety of editing. There is no cut to hide behind when the scene goes wrong. Kata Wéber’s script never finds a structure that matches that opening, and the film settles into conventional grief-drama beats once the sequence ends. The single take is the whole argument, and everything after it is footnotes.
This is a film carried by one performance and one sequence. Kirby is doing the most interesting work, and the home-birth take is the kind of swing that justifies the whole project. The grief drama that follows is competent and familiar, and it leans on Kirby to supply the tension the writing stops providing. The film knows exactly what its best ten minutes are, and it spends the rest reminding you of them.