Critics reviews

A word about Kristen Stewart: she is very nearly wasted in Equals, despite it being the exact type of role she is suited for: a vaguely androgynous vision of monotone exteriority belied by studiously restrained depth hidden behind heavy-lidded eyes. It's to her credit that Equals ends up being as watchable as it is. It's too bad the film can't quite live up to her endlessly compelling countenance.

There are many thoughtful or amusing touches in "Equals," especially its portrait of love advocates who suffer in silence and occasionally trade war stories in support groups (one of them is Guy Pearce, characteristically excellent as a "been there, buddy" advisor to the hero). But there are no ideas to speak of in this movie. It's mainly a poster tagline filled out with characters and scenes.

The story is told through Silas' perspective and his evolution into a more rounded human being — he cries and forgets to shave — continues to register as stiffly as when he started. Equals wants to access an untapped wellspring of feeling — happiness, depression, fear, and love, all experienced for the first time — but it plumbs barren ground.

The movie dithers in reverie, with Doremus giving us longing, shaky close-ups against beds of plangent electronica, then giving us some more. Maybe he's consciously denying us the satisfactions of genre — pointedly not letting his story go the way of Logan's Run or The Giver. But he's not exactly filling the void that's left with anything revelatory, either. Doremus doesn't even seem all that interested in taking us into the nooks and crannies of this not-so-strange and not-so-brave new world.

All that this trite regurgitation of Romeo and Juliet by way of THX 1138 has us ponder is the horror of a world where pretty white people aren't allowed to smooch.

Doremus and screenwriter Nathan Parker play with many of the recurring preoccupations of the genre. Where Equals forges its own path, though, is in its depiction of mental illness and medication. The film uses the mechanics of dystopian sci-fi to conjure a society in which medication cures all — to a fault. Doremus's stark vision of mankind presents two choices: a volatile world ruled by emotion or a serene one without affect.

While it's heartening to see Stewart making a go of the airless surroundings, which seek out classical romantic restraint in high-tech circumstances, the film just never quite ignites, and Drake Doremus's derivative visual design is debilitating, echoing Apple ads of the distant and recent past.

Screenwriter Nathan Parker, who wrote Duncan Jones' mildly interesting Moon, here displays his duller side: seasoned with Biblical references and Shakespearian crossroads, Equals hits rock bottom with the romantic dialogues whispered by Stewart and Hoult. "Love is like a tornado going around," Silas blurts out after discovering carnal love. This sentence perfectly condenses the blazing and corny sentimentalism of Equals.

At the beginning, they are very cool and contained. But as the characters in the film change, new visual tones introduce themselves; a kind of warning orange will encroach from one side of a frame, like a kind of alarm. Once certain characters fully reveal themselves to each other, their flesh tones warm up. That sounds neat, maybe, but as it plays on-screen it's, well, numbingly obvious. This is a movie that really nails the seemingly oxymoronic phrase "profoundly dumb.

Visually, the film is more than striking, designers Katie Byron and Tino Schaedler make imposing use of existing futuristic architecture in Japanese locations... But there's a terribly déjà vu feel to this vision of a loveless future - echoes of bad futures that hark back not just to 1984 but to Evgeny Zamyatin's 1920s novel We.