Eva Green needs saving—not by Rick Santorum or the love of a good man (whatever that means), but by a smarter agent. Watch her pull off the impossible in Casino Royale and make a Bond girl listenable, and you know Green was meant for quick-witted comedy. Unfortunately, she’s becoming a mainstay of painfully sincere slogs: first, the recent Perfect Sense, and now this somber sci-fi art film, in which she plays Rebecca, a nostalgic type returning to the gray seaside community of her youth. As it happens, her preteen playmate Thomas (Doctor Who’s boyish Smith) is still around, but their heated-up relationship hits the wall after a fatal car accident early in the movie.
This being the future, Rebecca intends to clone her dead lover down at the local biotech center and bear the new Thomas herself (against the wishes of Another Year’s underutilized Lesley Manville, along with any sensible person in the audience). Womb would like you to take it for a subtle examination of genetic ethics, the reborn Thomas facing A.I-like resentments among his peers and burying his symbolic toy dinosaur in the sand. Yet it’s a whole lot more puerile than that, as Rebecca is revealed to have exactly the base intent you were originally icked out about. Was the sex really that good?
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