Renaissance – Kommersant

Yevgeny Baranov’s fantastic thriller “Reborn”, filmed in the USA and produced by Timur Bekmambetov’s studio “Bazelevs”, was released. This is another film in the screenlife format, with which the producer has been experimenting for a long time, clearly demonstrating, in the opinion Julia Shagelman, the very limited viability of this format.

Whether there is life after death, whether there is life after death – this is unknown to science, and religions have different opinions on this matter. However, “Reborn” by Yevgeny Baranov, whose previous works include the Gogol trilogy (2017-2018) and numerous TV series, takes viewers to the near future, where life after death has become the very reality.

It all starts with a car accident in which Stanley Martin (Dave Davis) and his eight-year-old son Nicholas (Beau Boyd) get into the fault of the first: before getting behind the wheel, he drank. The boy dies, and his heartbroken mother (Carly Hall) leaves her husband, unable to forgive him. However, a cardinal from the Vatican (Timothy W. Murphy) gets in touch with her and offers nothing less than a miracle: it turns out that the Catholic Church has learned to bring the dead back to life, and little Nick may be the first such reborn. The mechanics of the process in the film will not be explained – the priests insist that you just have to believe, but the result is successful, and Nick comes to life.

A few years later, the revival was put on stream. People are converting to Catholicism en masse, and those who stubbornly continued to practice another faith during their lifetime are baptized by their relatives after death and even smuggled across the border from countries like Iran. News bulletins flash on the screen, governments are mentioned to be concerned about population growth, protest groups are shown that oppose revivals. But the authors (the script was written by someone Joe Rechtman, behind whom there are completely unknown series) do not bother with details here either. Why does the church need all this? How do the revivals fit in with Catholic doctrine, about which the filmmakers apparently have the most vague idea? Why is no one trying to impose restrictions on this process? All these questions remain unanswered. We only learn that in order to be reborn, you still need to pass a test of righteousness, and this is done by hackers hired by the church, who are called “cherubs”: they carefully study the traces left by the deceased on the network to find out if they were hiding any sins.

The network and hackers are important details, because the entire action of the film takes place on the screens of computers, tablets and mobile phones. This is the same screenlife format beloved by Timur Bekmambetov, in which he himself directed Profile (2018) and produced two parts of the horror Unfriended (2015, 2018), Search (2018) and Missing ( 2023). However, unlike these paintings, in Reborn, the screenlife does not look like a justified solution, the only possible one for this particular story, but an artificial superstructure. Suppose, it is logical to conduct divine services and confessions via video link, since there are too many believers and they are scattered all over the world, but in other situations, absolutely nothing prevents the characters from finally turning off computers and phones, except perhaps the stubborn devotion of the authors to their concept. It is also used completely without any fantasy: in the windows on the screen, basically, different “talking heads” are simply replaced.

The plot potential is also wasted: yes, no one wants to ask philosophical and ethical questions, but the Revived team does not succeed in simply a strong thriller that surprises with unexpected twists and a shocking denouement. Of course, in the process it turns out that the Vatican started all this for a reason and a terrible conspiracy has matured in its depths, but it ends with an absolute zilch. And while the screen goes blank, the film is completely erased from memory, like a text message from spammers.