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  • Film Comment

    Little Joe

    Nov 03, 2019 2 minutes
    BY YONCA TALU

    Director: Jessica Hausner

    Country/Distributor: Austria/UK/Germany, Magnolia Films

    Opening: December 6

    DRAWING AS MUCH FROM FAIRY TALES as from psychological horror, Austrian director Jessica Hausner’s rigorously crafted movies investigate the uncanny forces lurking beneath reality’s placid surface. Whether a mountain resort in (2004), a pilgrimage town in (2009), or a 19th-century bourgeois house in (2014), the filmmaker excels, her fifth feature and first in English, Hausner fully embraces her genre influences to chart the disquieting repercussions of an antidepressant houseplant conceived by Alice (Emily Beecham), a gifted geneticist and single mother. Guilt-ridden for spending more time in the laboratory than with her teenage son, Joe (Kit Connor), Alice offers him a sample of the attractive crimson flower to keep him company and baptizes it “Little Joe.” But this innocent premise morphs into a variation on the Frankenstein story when Alice’s brainchild defies its own sterility by taking over the bodies of those exposed to its pollen.

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