Little Joe

LITTLE JOE - BFI

One of the go-to examples of how not to write dialogue has historically been H.P. Lovecraft. His prose has always been praised for its unique mythos and imaginative world-building, but many readers to this day single out his dialogue as disappointing and gawky. Although it is still a matter of fierce debate on online forums, it is commonly understood that Lovecraft’s handling of the spoken word may have stemmed from his own alleged social awkwardness or a limited experience of talking to people.

In the same spirit – and somewhat facetiously –  Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe feels very much like a Lovecraftian experience in that it is a movie made by people who weren’t interested in or knowledgeable about the themes, subjects and inspirations they were handling. It is as though the filmmakers have only known such works as The Day of The Triffids, The Puppet Masters or Invasion of The Body Snatchers by their reputation, as if they have proceeded confidently to use them as a combined inspirational template for their own narrative. The resultis outlandish and whiffs of gross incompetence. 

This story is about a female researcher (Emily Beecham) ensconced in her work  in which she breeds genetically engineered plants designed to make people happy. While doing so, she thoroughly neglects her son, Joe (Kit Connor). Along with the parrying romantic advances by her colleague (Ben Whishaw), these tropes create a profound smell of authorial dishonesty and repulsive snobbism. It is as though it was conceived and written by someone who didn’t bother to do any rudimentary research into the story, its setting or even to investigate the well of inspirations it was attempting to draw from. Instead, they locked themselves in a room with nothing more to hand than their imagination and a sense of disdain towards the genre templates the movie was going to use.

As a result, Little Joe comes across as fake, in the same way as an actor attempting a foreign accent without any preparation. This sentiment permeates the entire experience. Between Hausner’s depiction of what working in science looks like, her idea of a dinner table conversation, or the way human beings generally interact, the movie is teeming with examples of cardinal lack of attention to detail. It’s all theatrics devised by people who have probably never visited a laboratory or spoken to an actual researcher, let alone shadowed them for a day. Why would they? After all, all that seemingly mattered to them was to paint a vaguely familiar universe in extremely broad strokes.  Inspirations have been taken from the genre of paranoid science-fiction to produce enough of a narrative skeleton to sustain Hausner’s philosophising. She didn’t set out to use the genre templates as a thematic amplifier for her own thoughts; they were nothing more than bait and window dressing. Realistically, she wanted to live up to her reputation as a continuator of Michael Haneke’s legacy, and desperately so. The film is geared to apply this type of stinging critique to an allegedly misguided pursuit of scientific discovery and to comment on the emotional detachment of people overwhelmed by the god complex at the expense of everything else in the narrative.

These are all lofty aspirations and ideas worth discussing, but Hausner’s film should never be taken seriously because it has no idea what it’s talking about. It is a cinematic equivalent of a middle class teenager trying to dish out sage advice about life; it is bound to be a bouquet of truisms lifted from motivational posters found on the walls of your local GP surgery. Put simply, Little Joe is a festival of shallow pretentious pomposity. It is just as genuine as a scene where a bunch of scientists, clad in mint-coloured lab coats, have lunch at a work canteen and use slogans picked up from a cover of Scientific American. It is a perfect illustration of what happens when a storyteller completely disregards one of the most important rules in the game: write what you know  and ploughs on regardless. Jessica Hausner is a peddler of cynical self-aggrandising fakery. Hausner is not a torch bearer for concerned humanism which is what Michael Haneke’s cinema is fundamentally about.