7 DAYS This ‘it’ girl is no teenage dream
THIS intelligent sci-fi thriller might have been the best film of the week – if only the story hadn’t been done before, and done better, in last year’s Ex Machina.
As such, this feels somewhat Ex Traneous or even Ex Cessive.
Luke Scott who, as the son of legendary movie mogul Ridley, presumably didn’t get here the hard way, directs the story of corporate troubleshooter Lee (Kate Mara) who’s dispatched by a shady company to a secret laboratory.
She’s there to check the progress of the firm’s latest project, namely a lab-grown ‘hybrid biological organism’.
The creature turns out to be Morgan (Anya Taylor-Joy) a super-intelligent, telepathic girl who, despite being created five years before, has grown with supernatural speed into a teenager.
After Morgan stabs a scientist in the eye and is confined to her quarters, Lee must decide whether the experiment continues or she should be destroyed.
What we have here, of course, is a riff on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, albeit one seen through the prism of shady 21st-century business practices.
A pity then that the film doesn’t have more to say about the dark underbelly of capitalism, aside from a cursory boardroom coda.
It’s on firmer ground when musing on the nature of what constitutes humanity. Morgan is described as ‘she’ and ‘it’, while a visiting shrink (Paul Giamatti) challenges the creature about her/its capacity to feel and, by extension, asks us what makes us human.
The performances aren’t much to shout about. Mara, perhaps best known as Heath Ledger’s daughter in Brokeback Mountain or for TV’s House