Little Joe

Name: Little Joe
Genre: Sci-Fi, Drama, Mystery, Horror
Released: December 6, 2019
Duration: 105 min
Rating: 60
Cast: Andrew Rajan, Ben Whishaw, David Wilmot, Emily Beecham, Goran Kostic

2019

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Mixed or average reviews based on 25 Critic Reviews

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Mixed or average reviews based on 6 Ratings

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5.2	User Score Mixed or average reviews based on 6 Ratings

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Little Joe

Movie Details & Credits

Magnolia Pictures | Release Date: December 6, 2019 | Not Rated

Starring: Andrew Rajan, Ben Whishaw, David Wilmot, Emily Beecham, Goran Kostic, Jason Cloud, Jessie Mae Alonzo, Kerry Fox, Kit Connor, Leanne Best, Lindsay Duncan, Phénix Brossard, Sebastian Hülk, Yana Yanezic

Summary: Alice (Emily Beecham) is a single mother and dedicated senior plant breeder at a corporation engaged in developing new species. She has engineered a special crimson flower, remarkable not only for its beauty but also for its therapeutic value: if kept at the ideal temperature, fed properly and spoken to regularly, this plant makes its ownerAlice (Emily Beecham) is a single mother and dedicated senior plant breeder at a corporation engaged in developing new species. She has engineered a special crimson flower, remarkable not only for its beauty but also for its therapeutic value: if kept at the ideal temperature, fed properly and spoken to regularly, this plant makes its owner happy. Against company policy, Alice takes one home as a gift for her teenage son, Joe. They christen it ‘Little Joe.’ But as their plant grows, so too does Alice’s suspicion that her new creation may not be as harmless as its nickname suggests.… Expand

Director: Jessica Hausner

Genre(s): Sci-Fi, Drama, Mystery, Horror

Rating: Not Rated

Runtime: 105 min

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Critic Reviews

A.A. Dowd

May 18, 2019

Visually, it’s a total feast for the eyes, contrasting art-deco pinks and mint greens against sterile, symmetrically framed expanses of white, vaguely evoking the aesthetic of some lost sci-fi film of the ’70s. Read full review

Owen Gleiberman

May 17, 2019

An artfully unnerving, austerely hypnotic horror movie about a very sinister plant. Read full review

Chuck Bowen

Nov 26, 2019

Jessica Hausner confidently expresses a thorny and disturbing theme, though perhaps with too much confidence. Read full review

Andrew Crump

Dec 12, 2019

Little Joe could use a trim for better deployment of plot and unnerving atmosphere. No matter. Little Joe is a quirkily rattling movie, an off-kilter tonic during the year-end onslaught of movies proclaimed “important” by their studios, and what the film lacks in structure it makes up for in its eerie, cold singularity. Read full review

Movie Nation Roger Moore

Nov 11, 2019

It’s a mood piece, and the element that ensures that it comes off is Matz Müller’s brittle, unsettling soundtrack. The characters may debate the morality of their behavior in dialogue, but it is the soundtrack that matches their actions — violent, reckless and disharmonious to the end. Read full review

John Bleasdale

May 18, 2019

Compared to the sophisticated and nuanced horrors of Black Mirror, Little Joe feels like a fairly straightforward riff on a very familiar idea. Read full review

Todd McCarthy

May 17, 2019

A lifeless, tone-deaf variation on Invasion of the Body Snatchers. ... There’s just nothing going on here with which to engage your interest, nor is there a single moment to even slightly increase the viewer’s pulse rate. Read full review

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User Reviews

temptershell

Jan 4, 2020

An interesting vision, although very intimate and completely idiotic in scientific terms. At all, the film is not convincing, although interestingly artificial acting.

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Bertaut1

Feb 29, 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, atA 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.… Expand

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