The 11th Hour begins, as we all do, in amniotic fluid. Then Maria, the name of choice for lazy screenwriters writing about motherhood, wakes her husband to express the intense love she feels for the life growing inside her.
It’s half-sweet, half-spooky, and after a nightmare involving whispered voices and shimmering light, we discover that she has now had her eighth miscarriage. A doctor explains that Maria (played by Kim Basinger) simply cannot try to have children again. The movie is set in Germany, but everyone speaks English: “Your oot-erus is destroyed,” he says, making a serious movie sound a bit like Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein.
Maria tries to get back to life, managing a shipping and trucking company, but her head is elsewhere and she’s hearing the voice of her lost child. Director Anders Morgenthaler is adept at stitching together hazy, hallucinatory sequences in a corporate environment – as if someone drugged the film A Hijacking. After her husband announces he is not interested in adoption and needs to take some time away from their relationship, Maria is more determined than ever to get a baby.
A work briefing about prostitution and an infant black market along the Czech border sparks a brilliant idea – she will drive there and save one of these souls. She’ll need help and luckily finds a junkie dwarf, Christian (Jordan Prentice), who, for €10,000, is willing to assist.
Morgenthaler, who also wrote the script, is of the belief that just because someone smokes heroin they will automatically know where to find the pit of all human depravity in any town, even if there’s no indication that they’ve been there before. With Christian ready to turn away from his life of sin and sacrifice himself to deliver a child to this saintly woman, the movie sinks lower and lower into stupidity. When Peter Stormare shows up as the Russian mafia spirit of vengeance, all the nifty lighting and moody music in the world can’t hide the fact that this movie is a joke.
One can’t fault Basinger. The last great role she’s had may have been way back in 2002, with 8 Mile. That’s cruel Hollywood having no interest in adult women, an issue that, thankfully, has been getting more attention of late.
On paper, The 11th Hour may have sounded like the role to offer a jolt to a receding career. Unfortunately, this is not the case. After the evocative opening, it is mired in cliche. Few suspend disbelief with more swiftness than I, yet during the film’s more violent and (allegedly) dramatic passages, I found myself asking: “Why the hell is this happening?”
The drive to reproduce is, for many, the most singular of human desires. The 11th Hour expresses this, however, with a story very far removed from realistic human behaviour.
• The 11th Hour is released in the US on 12 June
