'I Origins': The look (and lab work) of love
Writer-director Mike Cahill's Sundance Film Festival-winning debut, Another Earth, was that rare thing, an ingeniously constructed, rigorous, and unsentimental work about the redemptive power of love.
Writer-director Mike Cahill's Sundance Film Festival-winning debut, Another Earth, was that rare thing, an ingeniously constructed, rigorous, and unsentimental work about the redemptive power of love.
A self-confessed fan of what he calls "metaphysical films," including Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Véronique, Cahill used the high-concept sci-fi thriller to explore much deeper questions about human existence.
He continues to use sci-fi tropes as metaphors for larger questions in I Origins, an ambitious, if not altogether successful, attempt to engage in the faith versus science debate.
Michael Pitt stars as Ian Gray, a molecular biologist who constructs an elaborate experiment to prove conclusively that the human eye developed through Darwinian evolution.
It involves tracking down the gene responsible for the development of the eye and finding the most primitive, least complex organism that has that gene.
If successful, Ian tells his comely lab assistant Karen (Brit Marling), he would forever end the debate by proponents of intelligent design who say the human eye is far too complex to have developed by sheer chance.
Ian's personal life takes him in a different direction. Entirely oblivious to Karen's infatuation with him, the biologist one night is thunderstruck with soul-wracking love by the eyes of a masked woman at a Halloween party. Not able to get her name before she leaves, Ian resigns himself to never seeing her again.
But he finds her again one afternoon when he notices that he keeps running into the number 11. She appears at the end of the rainbow when he decides to follow the number (he takes the No. 11 bus, gets off at 11th Avenue, and so on).
An exotic Argentine-French model, Sofi (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) is Ian's opposite: a deeply spiritual new ager who is convinced she has been reincarnated.
Filmed with Cahill's distinct poetic style, I Origins makes the lab work look as exciting as the frequent sex scenes. Well, almost.
The first half is animated by the same spirit of enigmatic wonder that so distinguished Another Earth, progressing through the ebb and flow of its characters' love triangle.
But Cahill pushes the story from the enigmatic to the dogmatic. It's obvious from the foregoing that Sofi will somehow place Ian on the road to a Deep Spiritual Experience. It happens in New Delhi, in a compelling if somewhat cliched sequence that has Ian discover someone with a pair of eyes as haunting as Sofi's peepers.
Instead of keeping things open-ended, the film pushes Ian from one extreme, atheism, to yet another form of certainty.
Cahill is one of the most talented filmmakers to emerge in the last decade. His sophomore feature may disappoint, but it's clear he has much more to say.
I Origins **1/2 (out of four stars)
Directed by Mike Cahill. With Michael Pitt, Brit Marling, Astrid Berges-Frisbey. Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures.
Running time: 1 hour, 53 mins.
Parent's guide: R (adult subjects, some sexuality, language).
Playing at: Ritz Five, Carmike Cinema/Ritz Center 16.
EndText