THE REBORN and the Miracle of Movie Science

THE REBORN (DVD)

2025 / 86 min

IndiePix

Review by Mr. Bonnie, the Betrayer😺

Here’s an interesting Chilean thriller that might’ve escaped your radar…

Manuel (Pedro Fontaine) and Oscar (Marco Antonio Caponi) are brothers who once had an unusual way of making a living: They’d be hired to fake the deaths of various people who needed to disappear, then chemically resurrect them after the funeral...through the miracle of movie science. 

Though now estranged from each other, the two are coerced into performing one last job…to fake the death of a mob bookkeeper who's skimmed millions from his boss. Things go swimmingly until Oscar takes off with the bookkeeper and extorts him for money before driving him across the border to start a new life. Meanwhile, the guys who originally hired them force Manuel to help find his brother and grab the bookkeeper. It turns out their plan all along was to betray the bookkeeper by selling him to the same mob boss.

"We have to resurrect him. The man owed me 18 bucks."

The narrative is loaded with conflict, complications and plot turns, most of them pretty interesting, if not always entirely plausible. But that’s never been a prerequisite for a good thriller. In the moment, The Reborn is very engaging, with numerous tension-filled sequences and bursts of vivid violence. Despite not having a lot of words for each other, the strained relationship between Manuel and Oscar is well established with a minimum of exposition. Hence, we become invested in both of them, even with their opposing agendas.

Good performances, a gritty atmosphere and an overall serious tone make The Reborn an enjoyably intense film, which sort of plays like a more grounded (and believable) variation of Eraser. For action fans looking for something a little different from the usual Hollywood boomfest, try giving this one a spin.