This taut sci-fi thriller about a genetically engineered plant with a mysterious scent keeps the viewer guessing to the very endIn Danse Macabre, his piercing analysis of the horror genre, Stephen King cites a key moment of uncanny weirdness from Jack Finney’s 1955 novel The Body Snatchers. Convinced that her Uncle Ira is not her Uncle Ira any more, the apparently delusional Wilma Lentz has discreetly checked his neck, where Ira had a tiny scar. “And the scar’s gone?” our narrator asks, suddenly excited by the possibility of proof. “No!” replies Wilma, almost indignantly. “It’s there – the scar – exactly like Uncle Ira’s!”
That moment of what King calls “utter subjectivity, and utter paranoia” kept coming back to me while watching Little Joe, an icily satirical psychological sci-fi thriller from Jessica Hausner, the Austrian writer-director behind Lourdes and Amour Fou. A fairytale-inflected yarn about a genetically engineered plant that may or may not be infecting human minds, Little Joe is described by its creator as “a parable about what is strange within ourselves”, and is full of Finney-esque details in which the familiar seems alien – not least when troubled plant-breeder Bella (played with nerves on display by Kerry Fox) declares that her beloved dog, Bello, is “not my dog” anymore. Later, Alice (Cannes prize winner Emily Beecham), whose new flower is being rushed to market, worries that she “just doesn’t know” her pubertal son, Joe, any more, an assessment her colleague and wannabe paramour Chris (played with a passively sinister lilt by Ben Whishaw) puts down to him simply “growing up”.