By: JWBM
What is life? No one would question a man or animal that walks and breathes as living. What are emotions? Put a man or animal into a stressful situation outside of routine and no one would question their actions or individual motivations as not being emotional. The bigger question is: Can man create life and emotions, or even individual thought patterns, apart from his DNA?
The story has an interesting sense of evolution to it. Where it starts out like your everyday horror feature with a lone, pretty blonde being kidnapped and experimented on by some rich, hyper-intelligent tycoon, it mutates into something more thought provoking along the lines of science fiction and technological morality. The main villain is an inventor who specializes in lifeforms—he also has success, investors, wealth, and security at his finger tips—though he's obsessive, which makes him alone, and with an ironic sense of being a two-dimensional force lacking in proper human interaction and normal emotional responses. We get to see his test subjects grow and excel beyond their initial capabilities from the caged predicament they are put into—because life flourishes; emotions can't always be held back or controlled.
The lead, Julia—played by Maika Monroe of "It Follows"—is fierce, smart, and adaptive. What separates her from her captor is she recognizes needs and injects careful feeling into processing a situation where true interaction stems. There are intriguing questions of why life protects life from a mutual friendship or benefit, to moral questions of life ending life from severing a relationship or usefulness. Things can't be governed by solely logical actions, as they can't be pure emotions either. Existence isn't perfection, neither is it always nailed down by a single definition in the page of a book.
The film takes place in a single environment, though it used the confined spaces to outline everyday aspects the normal person caught in a routine wouldn't sit down and ponder on. This isn't going to be a lecture by any means; it still has a sense of entertainment with suspense, and a connection to the characters: one human test subject, and one computer test subject who make an unlikely bond that's memorable enough to last after the credits roll.
Rating: 8/10
Director: Federico D'Alessandro
Actors: Maika Monroe, Ed Skrein, Gary Oldman
Info: IMDB link
Trailer: Youtube link
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