Eugenio Mira’s amusing and peculiar cult classic, The Birthday, might be flawed, but its zany attitude and fascinating mixing of genres make it a unique, if uneven, experience.
Director: Eugenio Mira
Genre: Comedy, Horror, Sci-Fi
Run Time: 100′
Original Premiere: 2004 at Sitges
Restoration U.S. Release Date: one-night-only theatrical event on October 1, 2024; in select US cities from October 11, 2024
U.K. Release Date: TBA
Buildup is important in most films. Horrors and mysteries perhaps require the deftest use of the right amount of intrigue along with a suitable payoff. Show the monster’s face too early, for example, and the power of tension might be lost, or when you do reveal a particular twist, you need to make it memorable and unique. Whilst The Birthday doesn’t have a monster in the most obvious sense, it does take its time ratcheting up the mystery—at least half of its runtime—before it descends into its central storyline of paranoia, cults, and doomsday proclamations.
The buildup is decent, if a little protracted, and whilst the payoff is far from lacking, it stutters after showing its hand too early and descending into a confusing narrative fuzz.
The Birthday has all the makings of a cult film, both in its bizarre nature and the fact it has been essentially lost since its world premiere in 2004 at the Sitges International Film Festival. Shortly after the festival, a bootleg version hit YouTube, and 20 years later, Eugenio Mira’s (Grand Piano) whacky mishmash of genres is now set for a 4K re-release. At the centre of The Birthday, which takes place on one eventful night at a lavish birthday party in a hotel, is Norman Forrester (Corey Feldman, Stand by Me). Norman is soft-spoken, bumbling, and awkward—and that’s even before the night in question. He is set to meet his girlfriend’s parents for the first time at her father’s birthday party.
From the off, Mira does a stellar job in transporting us to the dark and weird depths of the labyrinthine hotel setting, with its weaving hallways and frozen-in-time feel a mirror image of Norman’s increasingly stressed mindset. The camerawork constantly roves around the packed hotel ballroom, reeling around with impressive timing when a random character pops up with a weird retort or sentiment. In these initial stages, The Birthday is a joy to watch, a real livewire of a film that slowly and painfully cranks up the pressure cooker atmosphere that threatens to suffocate Norman.
It can get somewhat tiring after a good hour of this energy, but The Birthday lifts off again when Norman discovers that an ancient evil lurks within the hotel, and its followers believe this is the night it will be resurrected. Norman’s night begins to go downhill even more from here, as Mira chucks in horror, sci-fi, and fantasy tropes into the mix. Most of it sticks, from the intelligent use of shadows and blackness to more terrific camerawork. The same can be said of the plot, which branches all over the place with little asides here and there, most of which work but some of which seem pointless.
One of the biggest champions of The Birthday is Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us), and you can see why the comedy and horror icon loves it so much; a playful surrealism and horror tinge a domestic, everyday situation with bizarre results. Where Peele’s films succeed in their brutal and satisfying payoff, however, The Birthday struggles. The intrigue, however great it is, gives way to something that isn’t hugely enlightening or surprising, and an impressively sensory and dizzying conclusion can’t mask the thinness of the plot. The style on show can’t fully mask the splurge of weak ideas contained in The Birthday.
The new 4K restoration of The Birthday premiered in theaters on October 1, 2024 with a one-night-only theatrical event in over 20 Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas nationwide. The film will open in select US cities from October 11, 2024.
