Little Joe review

LITTLE JOE (2019)

Director: Jessica Hausner

Stars: Emily Beecham, Ben Wishaw, Kerry Fox

Runtime: 105 min

 

 

Little Joe is a strange little film that seems to have passed almost unnoticed, but it is really worth tracking down.

 

It centres on Alice, a single mother who is a plant breeder working for a corporation that develops new types of plants. The one she is working on is bright red and appears to have an ability to make whoever looks after it happy (if they feed it properly and talk to it).

 

Alice sneaks one of these plants out of her lab and takes it home for her teenage son, Joe, to look after, giving it the titular handle Little Joe. 

 

Now, as we've all gathered by this stage - from the creepy long slow tracking shots across the strikingly white laboratory and from the in-house arguments with some of the other plant scientists about whether Alice's new plant could be harming their own experiments - there might be something a little "off" about this new species. And sure enough soon Alice and Joe are having some doubts about the plant's harmlessness.

 

As is Kerry Fox, another worker at the lab who's dog seems to be having an unusual reaction...

 

OK. As becomes increasingly apparent we're actually in Invasion Of The Body Snatchers territory here, but in a very slow spooky and subversive way. What is perhaps most impressive about the film is that despite the very deliberate pacing and the fact that things happen carefully and subtly without a lot of spectacle, it still remains totally riveting. 

 

The production design is outstanding, the performances low-key and excellent (Wishaw is a lab assistant without actually a lot to do, but brings his usual high class character work to proceedings), and the story intriguingly teasing without ever giving much away. It's a strange creepy film, redolent in uneasy atmosphere and totally captivating. 

 

I haven't seen any of director Hausner's previous films (Amour Fou, Lourdes, Toast, Hotel) but I will certainly be searching them out. Good stuff.