The Sur­ro­gate

No prizes for guess­ing what The Sur­ro­gate is about: the film does exact­ly what it says it will do, by pro­vid­ing a por­trait of Jess (Jas­mine Batch­e­lor), a woman who has decid­ed to car­ry a child for her friends Josh (Chris Per­fet­ti) and Aaron (Sul­li­van Jones), and who comes up against a moral quandary which oppos­es her to them when the foe­tus is diag­nosed with Down Syndrome.

That lack of fuss in the film’s title is a good indi­ca­tion of the meth­ods of writer/​director Jere­my Hersh, whose approach is win­ning­ly lucid and clut­ter-free. His debut fea­ture is art­ful­ly con­struct­ed so that the writ­ing appears to stem from char­ac­ter rather than the oth­er way around: hew­ing close to his sub­jects, Hersh seems to observe them on the fly, in a mode that feels almost improvisatory.

This is how we first meet Jess, whose open­ness and gen­eros­i­ty of spir­it mark her out as a moral com­pass for the film, but which also seem to betray a cer­tain naivety. In ear­ly scenes, Jess is so cer­tain that sur­ro­ga­cy will be a dod­dle that we sur­mise she may be in for a rough ride. Equal­ly, the light­ly sketched solip­sism betrayed by Josh and Aaron in their desire for a baby seems to pre­des­tine them for a con­fronta­tion with their friend.

Once the diag­no­sis has been made, the film takes the shape of a debate, even a bat­tle. Hersh is shrewd in out­lin­ing, in a series of dis­cur­sive scenes, how Jess’ uncer­tain­ty about her sit­u­a­tion grad­u­al­ly cal­ci­fies into the con­vic­tion that she should car­ry to term, and par­ent, the future infant. The film’s prin­ci­pal, quite daz­zling qual­i­ty, is its unfash­ion­able will­ing­ness to con­front head-on some extreme­ly knot­ty ques­tions – about race, iden­ti­ty and ethics – and to do so in a messy, ambigu­ous way that is all the more human for it.

The Sur­ro­gate doesn’t land defin­i­tive­ly on any one side of the eth­i­cal dilem­ma it pro­pos­es, although it is mer­ci­less in its depic­tion of the gay men’s priv­i­lege and care­less misog­y­ny. As Jess con­tin­ues along her path, the film shows beau­ti­ful­ly how her iden­ti­ty is able to lead her to exert empa­thy: in one pow­er­ful scene where Jess, new­ly enlight­ened, con­fronts the own­er of a bar over its lack of dis­abled access, you sense how she, too, may have felt kept aside from cer­tain parts of society.

If the film is intel­lec­tu­al­ly stur­dy, and laud­ably loose in its approach to act­ing and char­ac­ter, it occa­sion­al­ly suf­fers some­what from stag­ing what feels like a series of dialec­ti­cal vignettes in a suc­ces­sion of cafes and kitchens: a lit­tle more ani­ma­tion, or cin­e­mat­ic welly, could lift it out of that cin­e­ma-of-ideas cul-de-sac. But this is a fine­ly turned exer­cise. The word­less out­door sequence that caps it off, in con­trast to the many inte­ri­or con­ver­sa­tions it has staged for us, has the feel of a long glass of cool water.

The Sur­ro­gate is released in select UK cin­e­mas from 9 July via Stu­dio Dis­tri­b­u­tion.