Lit­tle Joe

Actor Emi­ly Beecham is styled to resem­ble an exot­ic flower in Jes­si­ca Hausner’s acetic para­noid psy­chodra­ma Lit­tle Joe. Her hair is formed into an opu­lent orange bouf­fant, and she scur­ries around her lab­o­ra­to­ry in an eerie mint-green lab coat which looks like a stamen.

There’s a par­al­lel between her con­fused and pos­si­bly depressed char­ac­ter, Alice, and ​“Lit­tle Joe”, the plant she and her cheery co-work­er Chris (Ben Whishaw) have genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered togeth­er, and which she has named after her teenage son. They both look out­ward­ly harm­less – some might say pleas­ant­ly beguil­ing – but deep down their attempts to make those around them hap­py are not entire­ly successful.

Lit­tle Joe emits a hap­pi­ness-induc­ing pheromone when you talk to it, and is seen as a zeit­geist-friend­ly break­through in the world of plant breed­ing. Yet this rev­o­lu­tion­ary plant is also the film’s femme fatale, with its lux­u­ri­ant red petals which prick up when it’s aroused so as to lure unsus­pect­ing vic­tims with a nox­ious per­fume and then swipe away their dig­ni­ty when they least sus­pect it.

This is Aus­tri­an writer/​director Hausner’s first Eng­lish-lan­guage film, and her predilec­tion for clipped, cold­ly emo­tion­al line read­ings dove­tails neat­ly with the clin­i­cal tenor of the sub­ject mat­ter. Ini­tial­ly, the film appears as an eccen­tric riff on the clas­sic plant-based hor­ror movies of yore, in which humans are enveloped in the aggres­sive breed­ing and cloning life cycle of some kind of exot­ic alien organism.

Here, though, it’s a psy­cho­log­i­cal takeover rather than a phys­i­cal one, as char­ac­ters are not mere­ly numbed to the depres­sion they suf­fer every day, but to all emo­tions, both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive. Lit­tle Joe neu­tralis­es feel­ing rather than enhanc­ing mood, but instead of going the Franken­stein route by pit­ting Alice against her unwieldy cre­ation, the film focus­es on one of the side effects of being this lack­adaisi­cal state: truth-telling.

Alice lives alone with her son (Kit Con­nor) and is so busy at work that she bare­ly has any time to bring him up or tend to his well­be­ing. See­ing what Lit­tle Joe does to the peo­ple around her – occa­sion­al­ly even draw­ing them towards vio­lence – leads Alice to unearth desires that go against social, pro­fes­sion­al and gen­der norms.

Despite its eerie mid-sec­tion, and a string of genre-like sequences of Alice dig­ging into research about the poten­tial effects of Lit­tle Joe were it made saleable to the pub­lic at large, the film comes across as more inter­est­ed in explor­ing how women fare in a male-dom­i­nat­ed work envi­ron­ment, and also the cop­ing strate­gies used to ward off the man­i­fold dis­ap­point­ments in their lives.

Pas­sive aggres­sive male boss­es, phys­i­cal­ly aggres­sive male col­leagues, wheedling male under­lings ready to exploit a woman’s nat­ur­al gen­eros­i­ty, estranged hus­bands who val­ue some abstract def­i­n­i­tion of per­son­al free­dom over suck­ing up their famil­ial oblig­a­tions – they’re all here, and they’re all ugly. The film asks how far sci­en­tif­ic endeav­our should stretch, but also whether progress should be at the expense of per­ceived respon­si­bil­i­ties that have for so long been entrenched in the way soci­ety func­tions. Lit­tle Joe begins as a dry­ly com­ic sto­ry, becomes a strange and scary one, and then ends up being real­ly rather sad.