Little Joe (2019, Jessica Hausner) (Patreon)

46/100

Made a point of learning nothing about this in advance, but it's pretty much exactly what I'd have expected had I seen the phrase "Jessica Hausner's Invasion of the Body Snatchers." Maybe a little more overtly creepy/genre-inflected than what my imagination might have conjured, but still squarely in keeping with her usual antiseptically stilted approach, which I've yet to embrace. Applying that to such a familiar high-concept premise has the benefit of novelty, at least, and snatched bodies theoretically provide an apt context for bizarro inexpressiveness (though there are plenty of emotional outbursts here—by Kerry Fox in particular—and those, too, feel slightly "off" somehow). But Hausner commits so strongly to maintaining ambiguity throughout that even the ostensibly suspenseful moments come across as purely theoretical, and her central metaphor is so blatant (hmm, what makes people "happy" by numbing them to the point where they seem like hollow shells, at once themselves and not themselves?) that the movie has nowhere to go after about 45 minutes and just keeps serving up minute variations on Really Happening vs. All In Her Head. Some of those felt kinda cheap to me, frankly, e.g. Bella feigning conformity (but not in an effort to escape, and without our knowledge—it's just a gotcha), or "Big" Joe and his girlfriend casually confessing to being pod people and then just as dispassionately claiming it was all a gag. Others seem predicated on tiny shifts in performance that I'm not convinced these actors (excepting Fox) are skilled enough to pull off given that Hausner's performative baseline is already pretty alienating. (González Iñárritu's jury choosing Beecham for Actress over Sibyl's Virginie Efira and both Ladies on Fire = sheer wackness.) In any case, another Hausner film that I find much more rewarding to consider in retrospect than I did to actually watch.