Genre:Drama, Sci-Fi
Distributor:
Twentieth Century Fox
Release Date:
25th September 2014
26th September (UK Cinema)
Rating: 15
Director:
Michael Cahill
Cast:
Michael Pitt, Astrid Berges-Frisbey, Brit Marling, Steven Yeun
As the Gala screening of Raindance Film Festival and the second feature length drama from writer/director Michael Cahill after 2010’s Sundance hit Another Earth, we were expecting great things from I Origins.
Dr. Ian Gray (Michael Pitt) is a micro-biologist, obsessed in both his work and play with the eye. He takes photos of everyone’s eyes and is conducting research into the possibilities of making a blind organism see. Ian’s character is loosely based on famed atheist and biologist Richard Dawkins and is very vocal about his scientific and atheist beliefs.
Ian meets Sofi (Astrid Berges-Frisbey) at a Halloween party and is transfixed by her eyes, but she runs away before he get her name or sees her face. He manages to track her down by ‘following the number 11’ and being confronted by a billboard with, you guessed it, just her eyes on it. Ian and Sofi finally meet and have a romance, which is cruelly cut short.
Roll on seven years, after Ian conveniently gets together with his lab assistant Karen (Brit Marling), peculiar situations present themselves around the birth of their first child. Ian’s quest for closure is led on a journey that takes him to India and makes him question his scientific atheist ways.
Michael Pitt (Hedwig and The Angry Inch, Boardwalk Empire) is excellent as Ian Gray, and it is a joy to see him successfully pull off Ian’s internal battles with conflicting feelings of science and fantasy. Astrid Berges-Frisbey (Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides) is good as Sofi, however as her character is very much Ian’s muse, her character does not have as much depth that Brit Marling (Another Earth) is able to bring to Karen. Geeks will also be pleased to see The Walking Dead’s Steven Yeun who plays Ian’s best friend and lab buddy Kenny. However his role is more to add moral support to Ian and witty one-liners to the proceedings than really have any impact to the script.
With the depth of the scenes it’s very apparent that Michael Cahill has completed some thorough research into this rather novel subject for a drama. Pitt and Marling spend a lot of the movie in lab coats talking science in their lab. These scenes have enough for you to geek out at, however the film doesn’t alienate you with jargon or pander to the viewer with over simplifying matters, it’s just right.
I would say that the way the film is broken up into two halves, separated with a seven-year gap does make the film feel rather long. It felt like it took a while to get to the point, and especially some of the scenes in India seemed to drag.
The script is fantastical, verging on the ridiculous, however there’s something about it that keeps you wanting to know what happens until the end. Some of the script seems unnecessarily quirky, however this fits the stylistic quality of the movie, but could mean this film wont appeal to everyone.
If you are able to go with it and enjoy the fantasy then I would recommend watching this. However if you are unable to suspend belief, in the way that Ian Gray learnt to, then you could be left feeling a bit cold. I’m still feeling slightly conflicted about what I thought about it myself. However, I’ve been thinking about the film a lot since I saw it earlier this week, and I think that’s what Cahill was wanting to achieve, a film that will make you think and question your own beliefs.
★★★
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