Lit­tle Joe – first look review

If there’s one les­son from sci­ence fic­tion cin­e­ma that’s worth being remind­ed of at a time of glob­al eco­log­i­cal cri­sis, it’s that you should nev­er mess with Moth­er Nature – and if you do, you’d bet­ter be pre­pared for the con­se­quences. This per­ti­nent warn­ing is the seed of Aus­tri­an writer/​director Jes­si­ca Hausner’s Lit­tle Joe, which puts peren­ni­al flaws in humankind’s design under the micro­scope to qui­et­ly chill­ing effect.

The film cen­tres around tal­ent­ed botanist and sin­gle moth­er Alice (Emi­ly Beecham), who has recent­ly devel­oped a spe­cial type of plant genet­i­cal­ly mod­i­fied to pro­duce a mood-alter­ing pollen. Of the var­i­ous breed­ing pro­grammes being car­ried out at Plan­t­house, a state-of-the-art cor­po­rate lab­o­ra­to­ry locat­ed some­where in the UK, it’s Alice’s cre­ation that has staff and share­hold­ers most excit­ed – mirac­u­lous­ly, it makes any­one who sniffs it feel happy.

Alice chris­tens this major sci­en­tif­ic break­through ​‘Lit­tle Joe’ after her teenage son (Kit Con­nor), and breaks pro­to­col by gift­ing him a spec­i­men. She gives him sim­ple instruc­tions to fol­low: keep the plant warm at all times; water it reg­u­lar­ly; talk to it and it will talk back. It quick­ly tran­spires, how­ev­er, that beyond its ther­a­peu­tic prop­er­ties Lit­tle Joe may cause an unex­pect­ed side effect. And we’re not talk­ing your gar­den vari­ety aller­gic reaction.

If Hausner’s film appears to share some of its the­mat­ic DNA with such hor­ti­cul­tur­al hor­rors as The Day of the Trif­fids and Lit­tle Shop of Hor­rors, it should be not­ed that Lit­tle Joe is nei­ther car­niv­o­rous nor overt­ly hos­tile. Instead it seems to be caus­ing almost imper­cep­ti­ble changes in people’s per­son­al­i­ties, mak­ing them less empa­thet­ic and more errat­ic in their behav­iour. They act strange­ly – as if they are no longer them­selves – but not enough to raise the alarm and halt production.

Much of the atmos­phere and dra­mat­ic ten­sion in the film stems from the sur­face-lev­el ambi­gu­i­ty of Haus­ner and co-writer Géral­dine Bajard’s script, which con­stant­ly chal­lenges our per­cep­tion of the char­ac­ters and, alle­gor­i­cal­ly, our readi­ness to accept sci­en­tif­ic author­i­ty. Could a plant ever mutate in a way that would allow it to infect and take con­trol of the human brain? Are Alice’s child and col­leagues real­ly chang­ing as a result of inhal­ing the pollen emit­ted from these pleas­ant-look­ing flow­ers, as she sus­pects, or is it all in her mind?

If the lat­ter is true it means that senior plant breed­er Bel­la (Ker­ry Fox), the film’s oth­er main female char­ac­ter, is the one who is psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly unsta­ble. This rais­es a slight issue with the script: while on the one hand Haus­ner and Bajard make a con­scious effort to sub­vert the ​‘hys­ter­i­cal woman’ trope that is still so preva­lent in pop­u­lar cul­ture, they also use Bella’s his­to­ry of man­ic depres­sion to attempt to manip­u­late the audience’s view of her present state of mind. It’s pos­si­bly intend­ed as a com­ment on the way soci­ety has stig­ma­tised men­tal ill­ness, but it comes across as a lit­tle lazy and tone-deaf.

That aside, there is so much to admire here, from the uncan­ny, pur­pose­ly stilt­ed man­ner of Beecham’s per­for­mance, to Katha­ri­na Wöppermann’s anti­sep­tic, Cro­nen­berg-esque pro­duc­tion design, to the sparse, eerie sound design by Erik Mis­chi­jev and Matz Müller, to the angu­lar, hyp­not­ic music lift­ed from the late Japan­ese com­pos­er Tei­ji Ito’s 1971 album ​‘Water­mill’, to the design and ani­ma­tion of the plants by Marko Waschke and Markus Kircher respec­tive­ly. It’s impres­sive how Haus­ner man­ages to splice togeth­er all these dis­tinc­tive ele­ments so harmoniously.

In essence, Lit­tle Joe is a tale of sur­vival, not just with regards to the tit­u­lar organ­ism, which seem­ing­ly finds a way to repro­duce despite hav­ing been engi­neered to be infer­tile, but Alice too. Through­out the film she attends ther­a­py ses­sions where she express­es guilt over not spend­ing enough time with her son. She clear­ly loves Joe but rais­ing a child vir­tu­al­ly sin­gle-hand­ed (Joe’s father, from whom Alice is sep­a­rat­ed, is absent for the most part) is a big com­mit­ment, espe­cial­ly for some­one as career-dri­ven as she is.

Know­ing how our cul­ture places huge expec­ta­tion and pres­sure on sin­gle par­ents, there’s some­thing espe­cial­ly potent about the way the film dis­sects the unques­tion­able bond between a moth­er and her child. Alice is not uncar­ing or unsym­pa­thet­ic but cru­cial­ly she is not shown to crave human con­nec­tion, reject­ing Ben Whishaw’s would-be suit­or and main­tain­ing a curi­ous emo­tion­al dis­tance from every­one. You get the impres­sion she secret­ly wish­es to be free of the bur­den of being respon­si­ble to anoth­er per­son, con­ceal­ing her true feel­ings to main­tain an accept­able social façade.

It’s at this point the haunt­ing truth of Hausner’s film begins to crys­tallise. Even though she faces a seri­ous eth­i­cal dilem­ma over whether to release Lit­tle Joe into the wider world, poten­tial­ly reset­ting the course of human evo­lu­tion, Alice implic­it­ly under­stands that only by con­tin­u­ing to cul­ti­vate her kin­ship with her new child can she ever hope to be ful­ly content.