Giving Birth to a Butterfly is a fantastic movie. The name kind of implied that it could possibly be some kind of Cronenbergian body horror movie but instead it’s a Lynchian family drama, which I ended up digging a lot. You get a sense of who these characters are and what they want, you especially learn what one character wants. This is on the outskirts of my usual wheelhouse, if its even there, but I really liked this movie.
Theodore Schaefer directed Giving Birth to a Butterfly as well as cowriting it with Patrick Lawler. Schaefer’s way of using the camera to show the world and how random it can be while characters talk about their lives is interesting. It can make the dialogue seem almost stark at times. The performances that Schaefer was able to get from the cast are amazing.
The cast is fantastic, Annie Parisse, Gus Birney, Paul Sparks, Owen Campbell, Rachel Resheff, Constance Shulman, and Judith Roberts all give amazing performances. Annie and Paul play a married couple in the movie and are married in real life. The real life mother daughter pair of Gus Birney and Constance Shulman add an extra hit in their scenes together, since they’re playing mother and daughter. Owen Campbell makes the most out of his screentime by saying lines that hit your right in the gut.
Giving Birth to a Butterfly is a hell of a movie, like a gut punch while dizzy. If you want to see something that takes a trip into the surreal that will also make tears well up in your eyes Giving Birth to a Butterfly is the movie for you. I give Giving Birth to a Butterfly 9 3 legged deer statues out of 10.