A deafening hissing sound makes the sound note of the film's opening.

Thousands of lab-produced seedlings need experts to care for them: if kept at the ideal temperature, fed properly and stimulated by speech they will bring a feeling of happiness in the owner.

Alice Woodard is the researcher leading the team; she is the originator of such a prodigy; she has designed a magenta-colored flower, a color that can be obtained by mixing equal amounts of red and blue light. It is the complementary color of green; magenta pigment absorbs green light-all colors maniacally present in Hausner's sought-after arty photography.

The relationship between the botanical geneticist, single mother and her son Joe is very confidential; they eat food delivery while the young boy draws comparisons between his father and his lab colleague, the former too different from her while the latter decidedly more electively related.

However, the boy fails to engage his workalcoholic mother in alternative activities to work that they can share together, and she confesses to the psychotherapist that she fears that something might happen to Joe, who nevertheless has an ant farm at home that he thoughtfully cares for.

Contrary to corporate arrangements Alice decides to bring into her home the artificial magenta producer of OXYTOcin christened Little Joe, who will watch over her son.

Arranged as an altar in a corner of the house it will divert the boy's attention from the anthill, a first sign.

Already other events had indicated changes in the lab, see the reaction of Bella's dog, the elderly research colleague, with an attempted suicide behind him...

Everything revolves around the more or less objective perception of people's transformations: an icy, artificial, icy world inside and almost identical outside.

Doubt keeps the film's balance constant: does the oxytocin flower produce serenity or simply eliminate all emotional drive? Does it produce a feeling of pleasure or does it simply level the mood? Can it be considered simply an antidepressant or a stabilizer of our moods?

Why use the term oxytocin and not dopamine or serotonin or endorphin also considered molecules of happiness?

Oxytocin is a protein-type hormone produced by the pituitary gland, released into the circulatory system and released by nerve receptors in certain cells. It performs the function of regulating organs and peripheral tissues during childbirth and lactation, stimulating sexual desire, and promoting affectivity and empathy.

Until a few years ago, this neurotransmitter was known exclusively for its role at the time of labor and lactation, as it facilitates uterine contractions and promotes milk production by the mammary glands. Recent studies, have shown that in fact this hormone also intervenes in many processes of our lives, playing a major role in the sexual as well as in the sphere of affectivity and emotionality.

It seems clear that we want to focus attention on the mother-child relationship: that hormone that enabled Alice's birth, making her a mother

could perhaps help her find a replacement distributor of affectivity and emotionality?

Could oxytocin inhalation be an alternative to a hug, to a prepared lunch, to maternal love?

Is Alice's Machiavellianly disturbing project innocent?

Have any supposed or unforeseeable side consequences been considered?

The film is a chillingly artificial and diabolical production of a behavioral thriller where everyone seems trustworthy dedicated scholars while they are the glacial affirmation of the most synthetic individualisms.

Alice who still feels her cultural inadequacy to be a mother feels the need to give back to her son something she cannot give him sentimentally.

Her biological fertility is a sentimental sterility, and in a world where there is no time for care and attention the post-psycho-drug might be to raise a plant that supplies you with oxytocin: a kind of Alexa that instead of responding to your desires eliminates them.

After pet therapy comes plant therapy: replacing the love of an animate being with a hormone pusher, whose side effects are still apparently unknown.

The mother/plant with her hands/leaves welcomes life as if it were dew, but being a mother is not resolved in being a parent; without the condition of welcome, childbirth becomes sterile.

The interplay between Alice and Little Joe's subseudonym plant hides the true sterile identity: an altar to the mother she is not and cannot be.

Bright colors, Teiji Ito's music mark the times and emotions; images and notes are absolute protagonists along with the red/magenta present in every single scene, even in a single detail. Drums and rhythm heighten the rarefied atmospheres and are reminiscent not so much of the body snatchers as of Bernard Brunello's Haitian zombie specter.

A miracle of form that of LITTLE JOE, where a chromatic psychoanalytic aesthetic is accomplished: the Lourdes director performs another extraordinary miracle; from the glacial psychopathology of the pilgrimage that has no time for cure other than that of healing from above to the diabolical obsessive performance principle of technique, which replaces the time of cure with that of the annihilation of need.

A symbolic portrait Hausner's is political, social, anthropological, where the Apollonian magic of the lively surface hides the veiled deep reality of the pathos: why to the LOGOS all the honors and to the PATHOS the cures?

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice