Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is back in Utah covering the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, and the premieres are already flowing. Scan through our full coverage of Sundance reviews from this year’s festival as they are published, and check out our full archives of past editions.
I know that at some point within my time writing here, I’ve complained about the “cozy catastrophe” sci-fi genre, especially as it relates to the kind of tech dystopia that has become the stuff of our modern-day dreams ever since sterile-white objects with rounded edges made their way to a Best Buy shelf near you back in the days when Steve Jobs’ public reputation oscillated between “creative genius” and “toxic ideas guy.” Once the latter gave way, and the former became the standard, our visions of the future lost their gunmetal color, serrated corners, and exposed wiring and became childproof. We traded a Deakins-shot 1984 (or even the 1984 ad itself) for another aesthetic — one directly meant to appeal to a new class that had emerged between the revolting proletariat of Lang’s Metropolis and the coke-sniffing boardrooms of OCP. If one had to define the aesthetic of something like, say, After Yang from last year’s fest, you could essentially dub it “Hygge,” which is a descriptor you could also toss out at Sophie Barthes’ The Pod Generation. After all, it is the Apple-Alexa future, but unlike Kogonada’s approach to storytelling (not unlike the kind that Kazuo Ishiguro or Brian Aldiss perfected, given that their works rarely smother the viewer with flat-yet-still-unearned emotion), Barthes piles on the unease and lets us sit with its implications.
Here’s where I make my contractually-obligated reference to Charlie Brooker: One could easily see The Pod Generation as an extended episode of Black Mirror, though I don’t even know what would qualify as an overlong episode of that show, given that they all started hitting the feature mark once the show moved to Netflix. It explores a scientific advancement — babies can now be grown in devices that look like an Apple-designed egg or something a Navy fighter pilot might have seen screaming past them on the USS Nimitz — and the sociopolitical consequences of such a revolutionary option through the eyes of a New York couple. Rachel (Emilia Clarke, doing her best with the accent), a career-focused business executive, gets a promotion at her job that comes with an extra perk: her employer will assist her with a down payment on a pod, which is about as horrifyingly dystopian as it sounds in all of its implications. Her botanist husband, Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor), wants them to have a “natural birth” and remains skeptical throughout the project’s initiation. There are a number of positives to this development, obviously: Couples who have trouble conceiving or who have circumstances preventing them from carrying a pregnancy to term now have an option available to them, not to mention that the mother’s suffering through the pains, aches, and nausea of pregnancy is totally eliminated through this method. Yet you’re also outsourcing your pregnancy to an Amazon-like corporation, which has essentially marketed it as a way of wholly eliminating maternity leave and testing new features on these fetuses while they’re still in pseudo-utero.
But something strange happens after the pair view the conception on a live stream and once the pod is brought home for its take-home period. Alvy’s initial skepticism gives way to a form of delight, where he takes genuine and loving care of the pod — pumping recordings of his lectures about plant life and taking it on outings to his office at the local college — and Rachel finds herself envious of the closeness that those (fortunately or not) who are unable to use the pod system have with their children. But sure enough, the two of them are forced to make hard choices about what they wish to do in the pod’s final days before their child’s birth, and they’ll run afoul of the people in charge of the program.
You don’t have to worry about any action-movie heroics here — there’s a winsome element of comedy to the whole ordeal — but the slow and steady undercurrent of dread helps to insulate Barthes’ handsomely-crafted world from the cozy-catastrophe moniker. Almost everything in this future New York is FUBAR in the name of ease and simplicity: Outsourcing AI to ensure that children (or, more precisely, their supervisors) never have to worry about messes at their tables at art class, centralized digital currencies meant to track one’s every purchase, VR nature pods and holograms intended to replace the experience of nature, constant (and aggressive) reminders of one’s productivity from sterile AI voices, and, of course, the whole structure of the pod-financing system and its terms-and-conditions itself.
What’s fascinating is how Barthes lets the unease sit with some of the genuine benefits of a hassle-free world and their equally fundamental flaws, and how intensely she preserves the question of whether these means are justified by the end they achieve. As an AI therapist (I shuddered writing that) tells Rachel, you’re still going to have a human child made from your DNA at the end of this – how is that any different than a “natural” pregnancy? One can refute this argument dozens of times with a thousand different explanations, but the core remains the same — a birth has happened, after all. There are moments I wished she’d either had her protagonists do just a little more or that her world was rendered with a starker perspective, as the light touch occasionally obscures the thornier aspects of its examination of these ethics.
Still, when it does work, and it hits those high notes, The Pod Generation achieves a kind of mild terror not unlike how one feels when walking home alone at night in a public park in Soni, where your only offense against the wide-mouthed and sandal-sporting yokai is to say Betobeto-san’s name and offer to let him pass you. There is no revolt or mild rebellion in this world: just a calm acceptance of your terror, with politeness and submission as your only defense. The catastrophe comes from the hopelessness, and that’s anything but cozy.