In terms of streaming video, 2023 will go down as the year everything got worse. You need at least a half-dozen subscriptions to capture all the shows and movies you like, if not more, while the services themselves now opt for algorithm-driven content that appeals to the lowest common denominator. All that happened before the two major labor strikes in the entertainment industry, which are certainly righteous, but will lead to a glut of reality shows that are cynically cobbled together with barely any creativity involved. What makes this situation so galling is how, just a few years ago, streaming services were taking actual risks by throwing money at any project that looked interesting. That is why Netflix, arguably now the most cynical of the major streamers, started streaming Antibirth in early 2017.
Written and directed by Danny Perez, Antibirth is the kind of horror film that pushes the boundaries of good taste until they are completely obliterated. It is a “body horror” film, arguably the most shocking subgenre, that usually features grim stories about killers and madmen who mangle the human form in ways that are more unsettling than gruesome. While body horror masters like David Cronenberg or Takeshi Miike often prefer clinical distance from their subjects, Perez embraces the gleeful horror chaos that you might find in a Troma picture. There are some scenes where you don’t know whether to laugh or puke.
The story involves Lou (Natasha Lyonne), a hard-partying degenerate who lives the “rock and roll” lifestyle without the requisite creative success. After blacking out during a warehouse rager, Lou experiences strange symptoms that suggest she is pregnant. Her friend Sadie (Chloe Sevigny) believes this is the case, and yet Lou claims she has not had sex in over a year. A pregnancy test confirms the inevitable, although Lou’s term is hardly typical. She experiences strange hallucinations, and her body betrays her through gruesome symptoms of rot and decay. Her teeth start falling out, for one thing, and there is one especially nasty scene where the sole of Lou’s foot turns into a giant swollen blister (of course she pops it). Perez’s script introduces several secondary characters, including the mysterious Isaac (Neville Edwards), who suggests that Lou may be part of a cruel military experiment.
Most audiences probably will not make it through Antibirth, and that is by design. Perez constructed film to be self-selecting, offering rare pleasures for those with the stomach to handle its queasy provocations. Lou undergoes such extreme changes that each new violation unfolds like Perez created a checklist to consider the breadth of human viscera and fluids. Part of what makes this tolerable is the stylized direction, which relies more on aftermath and suggestion than directly looking at each new development. By the time a fully-formed skeleton crawls out of Lou’s birth canal, leaving her as nothing more than an empty skin sack, the separation from accuracy is so complete that it is closer to watching a video art project.
Lou’s fate was sealed the second she blacked out in that warehouse, but thanks to Lyonne, it’s easy to care about her. In a performance before Russian Doll and Poker Face made her beloved among TV addicts, Lyonne creates a comic separation between her attitude and the things that happen to her, a kind of disassociation that is more about ironic commentary than trauma. And other than maybe Sevigny, who also does not shy away from outsider genre fare, no one — not even Meryl Streep or Viola Davis — could pull off a role like Lyonne’s. Most actors prefer a veneer of respectability, while this one stomps on that idea so completely that it takes a rarer kind of courage.
Needless to say, you cannot stream Antibirth on Netflix anymore. It gives the proverbial finger to algo-supported recommendations, as the platform now prefers the kind of horror provided by Mike Flanagan, a talented writer and filmmaker who prefers horror stories that are made more palatable by a dose of romance and melodrama. It is just as well Perez’s gross-out masterpiece can only be found through your preferred VOD platform. There should be more barriers to entry before seeing it, a kind of way for Perez – via iTunes or Amazon or whatever – to say “Well, you asked for it” before hapless normies or horror freaks finally press play.
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