Critics reviews

Little Joe lacks the pathos of Lourdes (a film as much about the mystery of human behaviour as of divine miracles) or 2014’s Amour Fou, functioning like Hotel as a kind of artfully affectless genre piece.

These particulars of color and cut typify Hausner’s talents for precise (but never obsessive) compositions: a mise-en-scène that delights the eye while disquieting the mind. Even a detail as seemingly insignificant as the contents of the dessert case at the Planthouse cafeteria rivets.

Directed by the Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner with a detachment more professorial than wry, “Little Joe” manages to exert a peculiar pull in spite of being constructed with material you’ve likely seen elsewhere.

Little Joe employs paradox and psychological dissonances inside the thriller form to generate intellectual suspense.

Like many heavily designed films that speak from a conceptual great height, Little Joe allows us only a narrow field of emotional engagement moving between discomfort to dread with a side of mordant comedy. But that leaves us free to toggle between a fairy tale of the Grimm variety and a hyper-realist story of science, nature and the contemporary female psyche.

It’s alternately hilarious and deeply unsettling, a film that pushes past its human characters to show the beauty of blank walls and ergonomically designed laboratories.

Every corner of every frame is busy yet minimalist, using patterns and repetition to, if nothing else, massage and entertain our eyes.

Significantly, this is-it or isn't-it approach that comes from Hausner’s deliberate modulation of tone and story results in a film without an obvious arc or even a climax. The softness with which Little Joe ends is hardly satisfying, but in a way is all the more devastating for showing the insidiously calm way horror can be integrated into our daily lives.

What ensues might just be categorised as a hybrid produced by crossing Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Little Shop of Horrors, though Hausner’s film – cool, calm and wonderfully precise in the way it establishes and maintains a mood of unsettling ambiguity – is far subtler and less generic than such a description suggests.