THE FLORAL TRANCE
YOU do not have to get too far into the sci-fi film Little Joe to sense that something is not quite right.
Actually, maybe you realise it straight away, that feeling of unease lurking somewhere in the back of the brain as it creeps further and further forward in your consciousness.
“It is really psychological and scientific and paranoid and mysterious and dark and awkward and loads of great things,” enthuses its star, Emily Beecham.
“And it has Ben Whishaw in it,” she adds. “And I’ve been a huge fan of his since I started acting.”
Emily is remarkably chipper for someone sitting next to one of the more sinister plants to ever appear on film.
The red spiky creation is the Little Joe of the title, not dissimilar to a Venus
Sci-fi chiller Little Joe centres on a sinister plant that makes people who sniff it happily compliant, its star Emily Beecham tells
flytrap, and is perched on a coffee table to her right.
“I’m not going to say what they are made of, because apparently, it takes away the mystery,” she jokes.
“But it is so pretty, it’s a bit like a fraggle.”
In the film, Little Joe is a top-secret strain of genetically engineered plant, whose microbial scent will make people happy, created by Emily’s workaholic scientist Alice.
Take one sniff and it transforms your mood. You feel happy but also changed, not quite yourself.
Written and directed by the Austrian film-maker
Jessica Hausner, making her first project in English, the movie is chilling in its cold and clinical storytelling.
In the film, people who come into contact with the plant turn into sinister, conformist versions of themselves.
Alice’s son Joe, who cares for the plant she has taken home, turns quietly indifferent, Ben’s character Chris, Alice’s colleague, goes from attentive romantic to worker drone.
“Jessica was inspired by Stepford Wives, Frankenstein
and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers,” Emily says.
“But the difference is the acting in her films is very natural – it’s all about what’s going on in the character’s head all the time.
“My character especially is very cerebral, a bit repressed. So she is always thinking and is constantly on this journey, trying to figure out what’s happening.”
Hausner may have been inspired by Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, but this time, the story is told in the age of psychopharmacological drugs, with Little Joe perhaps seen as a different kind of anti-depressant.
But any paralells with anti-depressants are not there by design.
“We never discussed that, but Jessica was always keen to say that that wasn’t her intention,” Emily says.
“But also, we did talk a bit about what your perception of happiness is and how that is different for everybody, and what somebody considers materialism or love or career satisfaction or the Buddhist idea of contentment, just being.
“Happiness is subjective and it is different for everybody. What is happiness? That is really the question.”