Review of Little Joe (2019) by Bertaut1 — 29 Feb 2020

A fascinating premise and setup, but the execution is tedious.

Little Joe is a clinically detached, aesthetically fascinating pseudo-horror with a great premise but questionable execution. I thoroughly enjoyed the first hour or so, relishing the slow pace and methodical build. However, at around the 75-minute mark, I realised that this wasn't a slow build to something; this slow build was the something. And with that realisation, it didn't take long for tedium to settle in. I certainly admire the stunning visual and aural design, but as a whole, it's like a long sentence spoken in a gratingly monotone voice.

Alice (Emily Beecham) is a plant breeder at Planthouse Biotechnologies, a bioengineering lab that designs new types of flora. As the film begins, she and her colleague Chris (Ben Whishaw) are unveiling their latest creation – a flower she's named Little Joe, which omits a scent that makes people happy on a biochemical level. Shortly thereafter, Alice smuggles a Little Joe out of the lab and gifts it to her young son Joe (Kit Connor), after whom she named the flower. Meanwhile, Planthouse employee Bella (Kerry Fox), who has had mental health problems in the past, becomes concerned for her dog, Bello, who has started to show signs of aggression. Bella soon becomes concerned that this change has been brought about by exposure to Little Joe's pollen, but Alice is dismissive of her fears, until she starts to notice subtle changes in Joe's behaviour as well.

Written by Jessica Hausner and Géraldine Bajard, and directed by Hausner, Little Joe builds a general tone of unease rather than relying on traditional horror beats, and is kind of like an episode of Black Mirror, but focusing on biology rather than technology.

The most immediately obvious element of the film is the sound design by Erik Mischijew and Matz Müller. Before we see any images, we hear a high-pitched drone, which later becomes a motif that suggests unease and danger. Important to the sound design is the score, or rather the lack of score. Hausner elected not to have original music composed for the film, but instead to use existing music written by Teiji Ito, which itself is deeply discordant, abrasive, and unsettling and which blends into the sound design. On top of this, Mischijew and Müller use the sounds of screeching metal, rustling, screams, and dogs barking. It's all wonderfully chaotic, defamiliarising, and unnerving.

The other aesthetic element that really pops is the cinematography, specifically how the camera moves. Director of photography Martin Gschlacht often shots scenes as if he's capturing images for a diorama – long, slow pans that often start and finish with the characters not in the frame. Equally as interesting is that on two occasions, he shoots a conversation by very slowly tracking in between the participants to the point where neither one is on-screen.

Thematically, the film suggests that if happiness could be made tangible and commodified, rather than such knowledge being used for the betterment of mankind, it would instead be a tool for control. If you created something that could make people fundamentally happy, think of the power you'd wield if you took that thing away, and only you could restore it; "sure, I'll let you experience that bliss again, all you have to do is everything I say". In an age when happiness as an abstract concept is being distilled into the evermore tangible, Little Joe posits a scenario where the abstract is made completely literal.

However, whilst the idea that most people would be willing to take fake happiness over real discontent is a compelling one, on more than one occasion, Hausner equates such happiness with the use of anti-depressants, implying that the daily use of pharmaceuticals is akin to people being somehow less than their "real" selves. That this is naïve hardly needs explaining, and to suggest that such people are being zombified is not only inaccurate, it's dangerous, the kind of rubbish that Scientologists yammer on about.

On a slightly different point, I'm not sure that the depiction of Alice's difficulty in finding a balance between home and work, and the suggestion that she has only achieved professional success by neglecting her child, will go down very well with the tens of thousands of professional women who are also single mothers, and who have managed to climb the ladder of success and be there for their children.

Little Joe has a lot going for it – an intriguing premise, a great cast, a gorgeous visual design, a superb aural design – but it all matters little when the narrative is so tediously plodding, with a message about pharmaceuticals that's well-intentioned, but misguided. I do hope the film opens doors for Hausner, who's clearly a talented filmmaker. But Little Joe lacks the subtle ambiguity of Hausner's Lourdes (2009), the bombast of a horror, the esoteric coherence of a satire, and the narrative drive of a thriller.