Film Review: Little Joe
Emily Beecham and Ben Whishaw in Little Joe.
This film is unease personified.
No film in recent memory has made the experience of sitting with a knot in your stomach so enthralling and intriguing. Trust is completely traded out in favour of suspicion, paranoia and dread, whilst a grating, sporadically explosive score leaves one with the sickly feeling that this film is operating with an increasingly sinister purpose in mind. And all this from an aromatic, genetically modified plant dubbed rather innocuously as ‘Little Joe’.
This psychological thriller begins innocently enough, in the pristinely organised laboratory of Alice, a senior plant breeder at a company dedicated to the creation of new plant species. Alice’s latest creation, a beautiful crimson flower is set to be the company’s most successful creation yet, not only for its alluring appearance, but for its incredible ability to supposedly emit a pollen that will make people happy. Alice’s creation, dubbed Little Joe in honour of her son is set to rock the world with its extraordinary power. Everyone should be celebrating, yet several of Alice’s colleagues are concerned by one particular feature of the plant that she designed, its sterility. Little Joe is completely unable to propagate itself, and as such is forced to ensure its own survival through alternative means. These critiques are completely mystifying to Alice, and so in an attempt to prove to her colleagues and perhaps to herself that Little Joe is completely safe, she brings a plant back to the home she and her son Joe live in. Slowly, those who come into contact with Little (plant) Joe - Alice’s son, his friend and several of her colleagues - appear undeniably affected, however whether or not this can be celebrated as true happiness is uncertain. Everyone seems content and yet slightly off. When exposed, or perhaps even ‘infected’ people speak, it is as though they are staring through Alice, through us, and beyond to something we cannot see.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not quite sure how much more of the plot I can disclose here, for so much of the reactions the film elicits; the frustration, the doubt, the anxiety, directly stems (no pun intended) from the plot itself moving forwards, and how our expectations on what will happen next, are entirely misdirected and subverted. The suffocating questions that are asked but never fully answered exist to cement Little Joe as a stellar example of a film created precisely with today’s far more film savvy audiences in mind. Furthermore, never since 2001’s: A Space Odyssey’s HAL has there been an antagonist so pernicious and distinct as Little Joe.
Perhaps what will impress most significantly upon audience’s memories of this film will be the questions centring on happiness that director Jessica Hausner so skilfully weaves into the films structure. Is manufactured happiness still happiness? Has true happiness become such a foreign concept in today’s world that we are immediately suspicious of those who appear to have it?
These tantalisingly complex musings and many more will keep the audience guessing, and the mind racing until the film’s very conclusion.
Little Joe in showing in select Australian cinemas from Thursday, July 1st.