Man, boy and genius

Anna (Nicole Kidman), a thirty-something widow, has waited 10 years before entering a new relationship. She is finally engaged to marry Joseph (Danny Huston) when a 10-year-old boy (Cameron Bright) begins to infiltrate their lives, a boy claiming to be Anna's dead husband, Sean.

This is the premise of Jonathan Glazer's Birth, and if you don't like the sound of it, don't go to see the movie. Don't go to see it either if you depend for your filmic satisfaction on tits, pecs, bums, blood, guts, car chases, guns, special effects or rock music - for there are none of these on offer.

What we have instead is a working out of this curious conceit in a measured, almost languid, way with cast, direction, script, cinematography and production design unashamedly in thrall to a very formal grammar of film-making.

Glazer is a television advertisement and pop-promo director who has seemingly graduated effortlessly to the big league. He directed the Guinness surfer commercial, voted "best of all time" - whatever the hell that means - by "members of the public". Personally I find the idea of an all-time best TV advert on a par with an all-time best shit, so it pains me to have to admit that I think Glazer may well be the most rawly talented film director to have emerged from Britain in the past half-decade.

Sexy Beast, his feature debut in 2000, was set in standard diamond-geezer territory; but that tale of a gangster being dragged unwillingly out of retirement on the Costa del Crime displayed both razor-sharp editing and surrealistic effects, while finally putting paid to Ben Kingsley's Gandhi complex by eliciting a startling performance from him as a goatee-toting psycho. With its turbid psychological undercurrents and slick surface sheen, Sexy Beast reminded me of Donnie Darko; but Birth is radically different and it's in this disjunction between the two films that I think we can perceive Glazer's nascent genius.

Birth is set in a wintertime Manhattan of fade-to-grey exteriors and sepia interiors. Veteran cinematographer Harris Savides, whose most recent tour de force was Gus Van Sant's Elephant, has given the picture an eerily limpid and desiccated feel. Faces are visages, dangled in the screen so that they may emote; figures group instinctively into formal tableaux. When the camera moves, it does so to telescope or increase distance in a queasy way.

The only music on the soundtrack is Wagner, an oblique link to Danny Huston'stowering performance in Bernard Rose's Ivans XTC, which memorably began with the overture to Tristan and Isolde playing over the smog of LA.

Anna's family is under the whip tongue of matriarch Eleanor (Lauren Bacall), who rules the roost in her beautifully appointed but arid Upper East Side apartment. Here Anna, her pregnant sister, Laura (Alison Elliott), and her husband, Bob (Arliss Howard), eat, drink and converse like the lineal descendants of the Edith Wharton characters they so clearly are. This is a timeless New York of wealth and privilege: we never see a television, never meet a black face socially, hardly ever hear a siren, and what people do for a living is of little account.

The impact of Sean - an ordinary kid from an ordinary Brooklyn lowermiddle-class area - on this glass case full of stuffed shirts is mediated entirely by the emotions. Sean claims to be Anna's dead husband; he knows things only Anna's dead husband could have known. He doesn't want her to marry Joseph, and for quite a while, as he insinuates himself into Anna's bed - and even her bath - it looks as if he will succeed in getting his way.

Is Sean a reincarnation? Is he insane? Is there some wider conspiracy to destabilise Anna, a young woman who for all her formal, moneyed composure radiates neurosis like a physical force? We don't know at the outset, and nor do we know at the end.