In Vitro
The farm owned and operated by Jack and Layla Curtis remote even by the standards of the Australian outback, their only contact with the outside world is truck driver Brady who takes their cattle to market and the temperamental satellite dish on the roof which provides internet connection, Layla sometimes struggling even to email their son Toby, away at school, the reason for their isolation being that the function of the farm is not typical agriculture and animal rearing.
Jack the founder of Precision Ag Tech, with their animal replication technology they promise “market ready livestock in two weeks,” offering “biotechnology for a changing world,” but reality lies far from the promise, their successful cloned cattle too few to keep the business viable, failing in the incubation tanks or dying early with liver and lung ailments, the cattle to be killed anyway but intended to turn a profit at the slaughterhouse rather than dying in the fields.
A bleak technothriller of isolation, deception and betrayal filmed in New South Wales, In Vitro stars Talia Zucker as Layla, accepting the hardship of her life and asking for little, and Ashley Zukerman as Jack, his ambitions for a successful business and happy marriage increasingly frustrated, with Will Howarth as Brady, also serving as co-director with Tom McKeith, the script written by Howarth, McKeith and Zucker set in an unspecified but near future where climate change has disrupted food production and storms ravage the skies above the parched hills.
The wide frame emphasising the emptiness, out in the fields and in the barns, filled with birthing tanks and automation but unoccupied other than by shadows, as Jack’s behaviour becomes more erratic, is it simply the pressure of their situation or is there something more in his increasingly controlling demands, Layla suspecting there is something or someone sheltering on their land which enters their home at night, he dismissing her fears by saying it is probably just a fox.
The implication being that the cloned cattle are not stable long term, that they are food, not life, required to make it to market and no more, the premise of In Vitro becomes more complicated with the early-revealed twist which should put the characters in complicated ethical quandary which shifts the status of the clones to more than docile, blank templates which graze and shuffle on command, but instead the film chooses the low road of generic outback survival, women chased by the armed man they thought they trusted.
The plot lifted directly from Duncan Jones’ Moon in broad overview and specific detail with a touch of Max Headroom’s Baby Grobags, the sidestepping of the hard science questions – even presuming an adult could be cultivated in a fortnight, how could it have the memories of its original? – had something sufficiently interesting been cultivated In Vitro it might have been possible to overlook the shortcomings, but with Layla failing to disarm or secure the threat when the opportunity presents or ducking when being shot at, it is instead an exercise in prolonging the already obvious through frustrating stupidity.
Glasgow Film Festival continues until Sunday 9th March
