Quietly unnerving horror movie offers subtle, scary rewards
If Ingmar Bergman had mounted a production of LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, it might feel something like co-writer/director’s bizarre and dreamlike anti-horror horror movie LITTLE JOE. Out now on DVD from Magnolia Home Entertainment, the film is bound to isolate general horror fans looking for a quick thrill but is almost guaranteed an enduring cult following from genre obsessives who prefer to be challenged and frustrated by their cinema. And if nothing else, LITTLE JOE is indeed designed to challenge and frustrate but it also offers subtle rewards and ample pleasures for those willing to navigate its austere weirdness.
Emily Beecham (who won the best actress award at Cannes) stars as Alice, a botanist working for a British company experimenting in new breeds of consumer plant life. She and her partner Chris (Ben Whishaw) have created a pretty and oddly emotional plan that Alice nicknames “Little Joe” after her son Joe who is light of her life. Said plant apparently releases a pollen that makes its owner bond with the sprout in the same ways in which parents chemically connect with their children. “Little Joe” feeds on human contact, on conversation and kindness and in turn, releases a hormone that makes its “parent” happy. Although explicitly instructed not to do so, Alice brings one of the plants home for her son as a gift. Everything seems fine at first, but slowly, surely, her boy begins acting strangely, removing himself from her and suggesting he’d rather live with his father. Alice begins to suspect that her “Little Joe” might not be quite as benign as she had intended, and when the plants begin releasing their pollen to staff in the lab, she wonders if she has in fact created a monster.