Apart from Tom Cruise, there's plenty of hot-blooded alpha males who would only be too happy to say they were married to Nicole Kidman.

However, it's never really been acknowledged that her myriad attractions - slight Oz accent, cute nose, massive bank account, extend to 10-year-old boys.

She plays Anna, a delicate widow of a decade on the verge of a new life with gruffly amiable, cultured businessman Joseph (Huston).

After courting her for three years, she finally accepts his marriage proposal only for 10-year-old Sean (Bright) to turn up...and tells her he's her dead hubbie.

The precocious whippernsapper also warns that marriage to Joseph would be bad news, advice she initially dismisses as the imaginative ramblings of a lonely child.

However, Anna - still vulnerable from grief - grows intrigued as Sean tells her things about her dead spouse only he would know.

Eventually, her snared interest reaches the stage when she wants to believe Sean - a turn of events that sees Joseph packing his bags.

Director Jonathan Glazer - a world away from the lurid gangsterism of Sexy Beast - builds up an impressively powerful atmosphere of mystery for the first hour.

However, the tried and trusted edict of less is more fails with so much being left out of the narrative that it struggles to proceed without liberal doses of artistic licence.

Hinting at the supernatural without embracing it, it's never explained, for instance, why Anna is in such a vulnerable state or how her young suitor is so eerily clued up.

The performances are excellent - long, lingering shots of Kidman's face registering her emotional disintegration while Lauren Bacall as her mother adds a welcome shot of acid wit.

But, in the final analysis, Birth is the sort of movie whose promising premise is never, er, borne out.

Tim Evans