D: Jonathan Glazer. S: Jean-Claude Carrière, Milo Addica, Jonathan Glazer. P: Lizie Gower, Nick Morris, Jean-Louis Piel. Cast: Nicole Kidman, Cameron Bright, Lauren Bacall, Danny Huston, Anne Heche. UK dist (DVD): EIV.

It is winter. In a long tracking shot we follow a jogger through Central Park, to the mouth of a gaping underpass. And here he collapses and dies. Cut to a baby being born in a birthing pool. Cue title.

The juxtaposition of these images clearly invites the viewer to link the two events – but by the close of this strange and unnerving tale, we have begun to wonder if this hasn’t been, after all, a piece of sly misdirection. Jonathan Glazer’s second film as director, following the dark gangland comedy Sexy Beast (2000), is about as unconventional as they come. A dark meditation on love and loss, Birth plays with the trappings of the horror genre but is, ultimately, impossible to categorise. What begins as a metaphysical chiller becomes, at last, a surrealist allegory about the madness grief brings, and the desperate measures it can drive us to take.

The jogger (we learn) is Sean, late husband to Anna (Nicole Kidman), a well-to-do young woman still living in their marital New York apartment. Ten years have passed since Sean died, and only now is Anna beginning to recover from the shock of his loss. To the joy of her friends and mother (Lauren Bacall), Anna has finally agreed to marry long-term suitor Joseph (Danny Huston), following much perseverance on his part. But their happiness will be short-lived. An unusually intense ten-year-old boy, also called Sean (Cameron Bright), appears without warning at the apartment and announces, to Anna’s shock, that he is her husband. He also exhorts her, in grave tones, not to marry Joseph – a demand he repeats in writing the next day. Disturbed by the child’s eerie persistence, Anna determines to get to the bottom of the mystery and, with the approval of the child’s confused parents, arranges for young Sean to stay over at her apartment. Somehow the boy is able to recall intimate details of her relationship with her late husband – but how?

As time passes, and their bond grows, Anna comes to accept the impossible: that the boy is the reincarnation of Sean. This conviction begins to cause her wits to unravel, and drives Joseph to leave her in baffled rage. Her mother and sister are appalled by the implications of Anna’s obsession, and urge her to give up her unhealthy liaison. But Anna refuses to see reason, forming a crazy plan to run away with Sean and marry him when he comes of age. Yet there is somebody who knows, without a shred of doubt, that the boy is not the late Sean, back from the dead: and that person is Sean’s former lover (Anne Heche), who seems to be battling her own crazy demons…

Birth is a genuine oddity, with an outrageous premise and riveting central performances from Nicole Kidman (sporting a Mia Farrow crop, perhaps another instance of misdirection) and the creepily intense Cameron Bright, as her ten-year-old paramour. Let’s get this straight: this isn’t some seedy porno-chic romance, nor even a sardonic Nabokovian satire, but something far, far stranger. The film often plays like a macabre short story by Daphne du Maurier, penned after a particularly heavy session of Freudian analysis. Glazer brilliantly creates an atmosphere of growing psychological unease, ringed with ambiguity and doubt.Helping to throw us off balance is Alexandre Desplat’s score: swirlingly romantic, quietly menacing, always surprising.

So how are we to interpret the film’s events? If Sean isn’t Anna’s dead husband reborn, how can he possibly know all the things he does? Glazer insists that Birth wasn’t conceived as a “paranormal piece” – yet conventional explanations of the outcome (that the child was deluded, or coached by a stack of love letters from Anna to her husband) are hardly satisfactory. Here, at any rate, is this reviewer’s take: Sean, the boy, is not a reincarnation of Sean the man – he is, rather, a screen onto which Anna has projected her undying need for the husband she lost, forging a kind of folie à deux between her and the child. Anna’s love has survived Sean’s death, like a kind of extrasensory force: roaming the world, waiting to inhabit the first vessel it finds. Love transcends rational limitations – even, perhaps, the rules of time and space…

The film had a pretty rocky reception on its release: booed at Cannes, and almost uniformly dismissed by critics as “silly”, “ridiculous” or “implausible” – all of which seems entirely to miss the point. You can be sure any film which lists Buñuel’s scenarist Jean-Claude Carrière as co-writer has a pretty strong handle on its central absurdities; in reaching for easy pejoratives, one suspects these critics were simply unable to deal with such transgressive material. A ten-year-old boy projecting the calm, confident gaze of an adult is disturbing enough – but for that child to be romantically involved with a grown woman (and Nicole Kidman, at that!) is deeply disturbing, and something the mind struggles to accommodate. There are, to be sure, some uncomfortable scenes between Kidman and the child – one contains frank discussions of sex (and the impracticalities inherent in their situation), while in another they share a bath together – which surely will have put off many critics. But even within its own essentially outrageous context, the film never oversteps the boundaries of good taste. It’s an engrossing metaphysical puzzle, for adults who aren’t afraid to think. Tellingly, it would be almost ten years before Glazer made another film (2013’s Under the Skin) – but when he did, it was to almost universal acclaim. The world had evidently grown up in the interim.