Hot take: Little Joe

‘Little Joe’ is an unlikely horror film about a group of bio-engineering scientists that creates a plant designed to release a heavenly whiff of oxytocin and induce a sense of well-being in its human caretakers. The plot is slim, but director Jessica Haufner expertly mans all ships to take an admittedly unsubtle allegory about the pharma industry into eerie, metaphysical territory.

Foremost among these is the starkly geometrical set design and probing cinematic eye. The colours are unnatural, and the only flowers in sight are artificially designed. The lead performances by Emily Beecham, Ben Whishaw and Kerry Fox straddle the fine line between robotic and real so subtly that it is impossible to tell which of them have suffered the potentially devastating side effect of exposure to the plant: a complete disconnection from emotion and a sense of impersonating themselves. The background score melds the ethereal sounds of flutes with pan pipes while rendering them oddly sterile, and dissonant Asian strings build up to a crescendo where they sound like dogs going insane.

Amidst all this, no jump starts or scares are in sight, only an oddly ominous sense that something is wrong and something terrible may or may not happen. The last twenty minutes do feel stretched, and the “science” behind the plants acting the way they do is laughable. But the masterful craft behind the film is itself a triumph: what better way to question the ethics of mood-altering plants than to transport the viewer to an artificial space where it is impossible to tell real from induced emotions? The sum of all moving parts is trance-like: I emerged from the screening as if put under a spell myself.

Genre: Drama, Mystery, Horror

Language: English

Runtime: 1h 45min

Year of release: 2019

Streaming Platform: N/A

Hot take is a series in which I offer my first impressions of films from India and around the world.