Birthmarked (2018)

(On Cable TV, September 2020) It’s really not a good sign if you make it to the end of a film wondering when the good stuff will start. You can call Birthmarked a slow burn, and that’s fine. I’ll just call it a film without a clear reason to exist. It attempts to be darkly funny in describing how two scientists raise kids contrarily to ideas about their “nature,” but that’s already a shaky start considering that few people will subscribe to that central thesis in the first place. It gathers no point for a restrained direction and a rather dull narrative. While Birthmarked does acquire a pulse very late in the process, by that point we’re in a sunk-cost kind of situation, as it’s easier to let the film play and see how it ends than stopping watching already. I should feel more positively about the film: after all, it’s a Canadian production shot not too far away from Montréal, and it’s a bit more subtle than usual. But there’s subtlety and then there’s having no perceptible point, and Birthmarked doesn’t do too well in that area. The premise called out for wilder screenwriting and much more stylized direction—what we got instead is simply too dull to be interesting.