A quirky film about our absurdly excessive pursuit for happiness is being released in the U.K. this Friday, February 21, distributed by the BFI. Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe is delightfully playful with its audience, creating a suspenseful film about a potentially lethal, albeit beautifully crimson red, plant.
Alice is a scientist who has genetically engineered a plant whose scent she and her team (which includes secret admirer Chris, played by Ben Whishaw) have designed to make people happy, if they take care of the plant by keeping it at its ideal temperature and talking to it. In return, the plant will release its pollen, which when inhaled will essentially have the effect of an anti-depressant.
Against company policy, workaholic Alice brings one of these red flowered plants home to give to her son, Joe (played by Kit Connor). Together, they decide to call the plant Little Joe. However, the pollen which the plant releases is not all that benign, it seems. Joe’s behavior slowly changes, becoming increasingly distant towards his mother. At work, Alice’s colleague, a senior scientist, Bella (played by Kerry Fox), is the first to suspect the effect the plant has, when she sees the personality and mood of her dog Bello change after spending the night with the red plants in the laboratory.
Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s latest film Little Joe competed at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019, for which Emily Beecham, who plays Alice, won the Award for Best Actress. Beecham is brilliant in this role, full of restrain and ambiguity, with her amazing copper-colored hairdo. Beecham has the ability of making her character both endearing and intriguing, while at the same time completely antagonizing. There is tension throughout this film sustained by the mystery of whether the plant is malicious or not. The film acts like a psychological thriller where the mysterious killer is a group of plants. How ever absurd this sounds, it is the basis of Hausner’s film, which does not shy away from it, but rather uses it as grounds for reflection.
This is Hausner’s fifth feature film, and her first in the English language. It is an Austria-Germany-U.K. co-production, developed with BBC Films and the BFI. Hausner co-wrote the screenplay with Géraldine Bajard. Hausner’s previously critically-acclaimed features were Amour Fou and Lourdes, winner of the Venice Fipresci prize. If you’ve seen her previous films, you’ll already know that Hausner is truly a master of her craft. Hausner is a skillful director who knows the language of cinema and plays with it. Much like Amour Fou, there is a perfect rhythm to the pace of Little Joe. It is slow, but it is a creepy slowness that makes the spectator question everything. Is the plant really evil, or is it just the characters’ perception? The style of the filming reflects the personality of its protagonist, Alice, as each shot seem to have been chosen meticulously, creating a pastel-colored atmosphere that is both cold and immaculate, like one would image a science lab is.
The music is used to perfection to make its audience jump at particular moments in the film. The soundtrack uses music composed by Teiji Ito (who wrote music for Maya Deren’s experimental films in the 1940s), and is a delight, so offbeat in its style that it suits perfectly this absurd story.
The film poses the question of what is human happiness, and at what cost should we attain it. The plant is designed to be therapeutic, but the artificial happiness that it is meant to provide seems to backfire. Little Joe acts almost as a cautionary tale, showing the implications of genetically engineering plants for our own gain. The film is though ambiguous as to what the outcome would be, as the film never reveals whether the mood changes in Bella’s dog or in Joe are really due to the plant.
Little Joe had a limited release in 12 theaters in the U.S. on December 6, 2019, distributed by Magnolia Pictures. It is now in cinemas in the U.K. from Friday February 21.
