AKA Clone

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DIRECTED BY: Benedek Fliegauf

FEATURING: Eva Green, Matt Smith, Lesley Manville, Peter Wight, Hannah Murray

PLOT: A woman impregnates herself with a clone of her dead lover and raises the child to adulthood, grappling along the way with the confusing nature of their relationship.

COMMENTS: “She is the victim of artificial incest,” the snooty mom declares. “Her mother gave birth to her own mother.” In the universe of Womb, the battle lines have been drawn, and the detractors of the ability to bring loved ones back through the science of cloning view the procedure as an abomination. What makes the moment funny is that the prickly parents who are lecturing our heroine on the immorality of the practice would be nearly apoplectic if they had any idea how far she’d taken it. They’ll find out soon enough, and we’ll get to see her go even further.

Its shocking premise powers Womb. To his credit, Fliegauf is never coy about what’s going on here. The main character raises the only man she has ever loved as her own child. The implications are significant, and she experiences urges both maternal and carnal, sometimes simultaneously. The most powerful images in the film are the ones that bring this contradiction to the surface. Many a horror movie has labored to create a moment half as shocking as the scene where 10-year-old Tommy stands up in the bathtub he is sharing with the mother who has cloned him from her lover and proceeds to recite a poem while she stares up at him. Is the look on her face pride? Lust? Both? Womb readily embraces every awkward moment, crafting discomfort out of such scenarios as Rebecca’s meeting with college-age Tommy’s new girlfriend, or a wordless confrontation with the biological mother of Tommy’s genetic material upon seeing her resurrected son for the first time.

Watching Perfect Sense was a terrific reminder of how much I enjoy the work of Eva Green, and it’s great to see her particular brand of repressed passion deployed here. With her icy beauty, her deep and commanding voice, and her uncanny ability to balance outward coolness with an interior fire, she presents a vented steeliness, letting out glimpses of her conflicted soul in careful portions. When her adolescent son falls on top of her in what would be a playful moment under any other circumstances, Green carefully betrays an electric thrill that lies beneath her calm demeanor. It’s easy to see what initially attracts her to the laid-back enthusiasm of Smith, and later what drives her to both impulsively bring him back into the world, and then hide him away from it.

Rebecca is a fascinating character, emotionally immature at best and morally corrupt at worst. (Notably, Tommy is killed while en route to conduct some eco-terrorism against the very cloning plant that will soon give him renewed life.) The film suggests that Tommy’s untimely demise has trapped Rebecca in amber, forcing her to bring him back to the very moment when his life stopped in order for her life to go forward. Some critics have noted that Green never seems to age over two decades, but they often fail to notice that she doesn’t grow in any other way, either. There’s a strong suggestion that Rebecca has retained her virginity over all this time (one scene makes explicit that clone Tommy is delivered via caesarean), which gives context to the concluding scenes that take Womb into a new level of weirdness and discomfort.

Here again, Fliegauf doesn’t shy away from the most interesting questions, no matter how skeevy they might seem. If you’re picking up on some will-they-won’t-they vibes, rest assured that you’ll get an answer, and even if you correctly anticipate exactly what is going to happen in Womb’s final 15 minutes, there’s still genuine shock value in seeing it all play out, and particularly watching Green’s shifting reactions. It’s unusual to encounter a movie that so readily indulges your innate morbid curiosities without itself being grotesque or devoid of morality. Womb is patient but focused, sometimes tedious but rarely dull, transgressive but calmly and soberly so. It anticipates the protests of those like that angry mother, and it responds with a nod and a thin smile.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Yeah, it’s as weird as it sounds, but sadly not as exciting… The upswing is that Fliegauf has created a certain mood for the film through its staging and its cold bleak setting works well with the subject matter. It’s just a shame that the script can’t match it.” – Niall Browne, Movies in Focus

(This movie was nominated for review by Duffy Odum. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)     

Where to watch Womb