LOS ANGELES — By now, the shot should be familiar: Nicole Kidman sitting in a theater, her face registering, among other things, hope and wonder.

Except the masterful sequence I'm contemplating isn't the one from the ubiquitous AMC Theatres ad that has been worshiped and parodied the last three years, but in Jonathan Glazer's 2004 film "Birth." In addition to ecstasy, Kidman's expression also conveys shock and anguish and, finally, acceptance of the impossible. All in two minutes.

Here's how it plays: Attending the opera with her fiance, Kidman's character, Anna, arrives unsettled and you can understand why. A preternaturally calm 10-year-old boy has recently turned up at her Manhattan apartment — at her engagement party, no less — and announced that he's her reincarnated husband, a man who collapsed 10 years ago while jogging in Central Park. Anna has been turning over the boy's words in her mind for days. Seated now, with Wagner's "Die Walküre" booming in the background, Anna decides to surrender to the unimaginable and embrace the fantastic idea.

And you watch the whole wordless journey play out on Kidman's face in the long, unbroken shot.

"I knew instinctively, in real time, that it would be the center of the film," Glazer tells me via email. "It was so eloquent. Like watching a trapeze artist on a high wire, poised gracefully in midair."

Kidman, 56, has forged a long career full of work in which she has walked the tightrope. She's still taking big swings, too, having just finished filming "Babygirl," a sexually charged thriller written and directed by Halina Reijn ("Bodies Bodies Bodies") for A24.

On the eve of Saturday's AFI Life Achievement Award gala celebrating Kidman's career, it felt like the right time to revisit "Birth," a movie that has been reassessed in the 20 years since its release, emblematic of the risks she loves to take with her work.

"I just have an enormous amount of trust," Kidman says by phone from Austria, where she's shooting a second season of the Hulu series "Nine Perfect Strangers." "I will just go places and align with people and go, 'Here I am. I'm yours. We'll live and die together.'"

With "Birth," she and Glazer created an odd movie that introduces Anna, a smart, sophisticated Upper East Sider, with a shot of her steadying herself on her husband's tombstone and then spends the next 90 minutes suggesting that she'll never escape his memory.

"This is a strange, unsettling movie," I begin, not long after Kidman picks up the phone.

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