If you’ve ever found yourself having misgivings about Siri or Alexa or some other personification of Artificial Intelligence taking a troubling interest in your life, the opening minutes of Sophie Barthes’ “The Pod Generation” may well give you the creeps. In a matter of minutes, as Rachel (“Game of Thrones” star Emilia Clarke) gets up and goes about her morning routine, we meet an AI household that talks to her, tests her levels (from blood to bliss), suggests an outfit for the day and tries to talk her into getting out more. Set in the slightly near future, the film drops us into a very sleek environment that is designed to look appealing even as it makes your skin crawl.
The more we know, the creepier it gets. This is a world where “nature pods” have replaced nature and where Rachel goes to an AI therapist that looks like a giant eye surrounded by flowers. And in the biggest, most unsettling feature of all, there’s a big company called Womb that will let you order up a baby and grow it not in your uterus but in a portable pod that offers your choice of music or podcasts and a handy carrying sling that can be used by women or men.
(To reach Womb, by the way, you can call 1-800-WOMB, which makes you wonder how the future will manage to arrange for four-digit phone numbers.)
An elegant satire on the rise of AI, the dehumanization of life and the thorny issues of reproductive rights, “The Pod Generation” turns out to be better at creating this brave new world than in telling a compelling story inside it. The film, which premiered on the opening night of the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, always looks great, and writer-director Barthes (“Cold Souls,” “Madame Bovary”) finds a deadpan tone that tosses out absurdities with a light touch. But she said in her introduction at the Eccles Theater that the film was inspired by dreams she had when she was pregnant 13 years ago, and it feels like one of those dreams where you remember the weird but cool setting but aren’t quite sure how it all played out.
Rachel is a rising executive at a tech company that makes AI units that serve as executive assistants for your entire life (though hers mostly seems to annoy her). She’s married to Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who has a very 20th-century job as a botanist and a house in the country that he refuses to sell, even though nobody else seems to have much use for plants or trees or anything, you know, natural.
Clarke and Ejiofor make for an impressive couple, but Rachel and Alvy’s differing opinions on machine vs. nature are partly responsible for Clarke’s eyebrows getting the biggest workout this side of Colin Farrell in “The Banshees of Inisherin.” And soon enough, they have differing ideas on whether or not to grow a baby in a pod, and then on how doting to get with that pod. (“We encourage you to bond with your pod,” says an unnervingly poised Womb exec. “But if your schedule doesn’t allow it, no worries.”)
This plays out to a prominent score by Sacha Galperine and Evgueni Galperine that has the feeling of a computer-generated playlist set to “placid and blissful,” though it drops in enough itchy little high notes to suggest that not all is well in paradise.
There’s an austerity to the film, but also a sense that this interesting couple in this interesting environment is going over the same territory with only minor changes. At the same time, the smiling bromides dispensed by Womb and their ilk just start to feel like more of the same; after an hour or so, they just aren’t as funny anymore. Eventually, the baby arrives in circumstances that we won’t spoil, and then the end credits are accompanied by a touching version of “God Bless the Child” sung by Tony Bennett and Billie Holiday.
Holiday, of course, died in 1959, and Bennett recorded his part of the “duet” in 1996. In other words: The world we’re seeing in “The Pod Generation” may feel pretty unnatural, but who are we to act as if we’re the guardians of what’s natural, anyway?
