Cannes 2019: Little Joe mixes Black Mirror and Invasion of the Body Snatchers

When Little Joe hits theaters this week, we’ve re-released our review of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, which premiered the movie.

If the Netflix series Black Mirror is “What if technology is too much,” Jessica Hausner’s faint science fiction vision Little Joe is a biological companion.

The “Little Joe” is a new floriculture, developed by Alice Woodard (Emily Beecham) and named after her son (Kit Connor). In exchange for the aroma, the plant demands love – it needs to be addressed and cared for. As the date of Little Joe’s public debut at the Flower Fair approaches, there seems to be something wrong with the plant. Alice has made some scientific compromises to make sure Little Joe is ready to sterilize the plant and limit its allergens. It’s unnatural, claims one of her more nervous colleagues, and it seems the plant is beating back.

Similarities with Little Shop of Horrors are replaced by similarities with Invasion of the Body Snatchers because it is less about a mutated plant and less about the length of time people go to get lucky, real or manufactured.

Joe (Kit Connor) and Alice (Beecham) have dinner

Although plant breeders must wear masks in the greenhouses until the plant is classified as completely safe, some of Alice’s colleagues inhale the pollen of Little Joe anyway. The plant makes those who smell it happy, but this luck seems to have a price – those who inhale the pollen of Little Joe no longer feel any other feelings and protect the flower violently (and violently).

Alice is reluctant to believe any of this until she realizes similar changes in her son for whom she brought home a plant to keep. He becomes more distant, less willing to tell or talk about his life. He even asks if he can live with his father, for whom he had previously only expressed contempt. Does Little Joe really affect Joe or just grow apart while Joe enters his teenage years?

The gaslight of Alice – her allegedly concerned coworkers trying to dispel her fears, and her conversations with her therapist (Lindsey Duncan) are not too helpful as she tries to talk herself into and out of theories about the plant – is deliciously torturous , Beecham, who won the leading actor award for her role at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, is awesome and alternates between conviction and doubt with frightening ease. Ben Whishaw is good against his usual sweet guy (he is the voice of Paddington Bear) all as a bourgeois guy who is getting weirder.

Alice (Beecham), tore what to believe

This sense of excitement is further enhanced by Hausner’s careful use of Little Joe – the flower blooms with an audible crackle. The scariest moments in the movie (which are more likely to focus on general horror than anxiety) are those in which Little Joe’s bud is closed when a figure is looking away, and in bloom when she looks back.

The film is also impressively economical, as the characters can be seen only in one or two places and often simply swivel the shots through the room and ask the viewer to do their own detective work. Adding a score by Katharina Wöppermann, which includes slams, groaning strings, and dog barks, gives you an effective recipe for chaos.

However, there is one thing that keeps Little Joe from being a total slam dunk. Overall, the notion that people are willing to take false happiness over real suffering is convincing, but Little Joe associates this with the use of antidepressants in a way that feels wrong. The use of drugs to manage moods – here Little Joe’s use of happiness – is meant to make people less than their true selves and thus protect the catalyst of this change that makes them violent.

The film eventually turns away from this idea and instead focuses on Alice’s insecurities as a mother, but the metaphorical germ is already planted.

Little Joe is not yet scheduled for release