I Origins

**Spoiler Alert**

Director: Mike Cahill/Starring: Michael Pitt, Brit Marling, Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, Steven Yeun and Archie Panjabi

Mike Cahill has quickly established himself as an original and visionary talent; first with his otherworldly (no pun intended) beautiful Another Earth and now with I Origins; an equally trippy and cerebral film that I fear will get overlooked in the mushroom cloud of multiplex fallout.

Cahill's film tends to shift gears at times, pulling us away from one comfortable, narrative thread while leading us to another. Where it begins and where it ends involves a metaphorical voyage, one that touches on spirituality and science and reason. It asks the skeptical viewer (like myself) to consider how a spiritual reality may exist beyond our senses, particularly sight, which figures prominently in the film.

Michael Pitt plays a molecular biologist named Ian who leads a team of young fellow biologists in a research project dealing with the eye and and its evolutionary development. He informs his new assistant Karen (the always beautiful and always beautifully mysterious Brit Marling) his research is motivated by a desire to show intelligent-design proponents that the eye is in fact a product of evolution. Ian's disdain for everything religious is quickly asserted early in the movie. The eye and sight--in their literal and more symbolic sense--are major narrative components. Ian's research leads him to photograph and collect visual samples of random subjects eyes, which sometimes betrays a fascination beyond his scientific interest.

Ian falls for a woman he meets at a Halloween party named Sofi (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey). It's fitting that we only see her eyes and even more appropriate that Ian is entranced by them. He asks if he can photograph her eyes, explaining his research while mentioning the fact that eyes, like fingerprints, bear their own unique characteristics. A brisk courtship ensues, leading them headlong into marriage. At the same time, Ian and Karen take on an important research project that, if successful, will conclusively prove Ian's eye-theory. It also means fame and acclaim are almost assured.

During a tender moment between Ian and Sofi, she mentions how she seems to know him from before, as if they met in the past. The idea of reincarnation is danced around but never mentioned. Ian tells her, in a kind of playful manner, that at the moment of the Big Bang, when all matter was compressed into an infinitesimally small space, their atoms knew each other and always liked one another. This seemingly light moment becomes a theme in the film whereby science and the fanciful mingle, if not merge.

Ian explains to Sofi that the experiment involves a worm--an organism selected after a painstaking search--which lacks a biological propensity for sight. Ian and Karen want to biologically modify it to detect light, and essentially see. Sofi naturally is wary of the experiment, citing ethical concerns like what right the scientists have to play god. Sofi also uses the idea of the worm gaining sight as a thought experiment. She asks Ian if he would step through a door if it meant gaining awareness of a spiritual light, much the way the worm will with the gift of visual sense. Her door question and the door motif will play a thematic role in the film; first tragically then transcendentally. More on that later.

Addressing Ian's hostility to spirituality, Sofi also says that ability to perceive light might be no different than someone having the ability to perceive the spriritual world around them--a very interesting concept.

Cahill keeps our minds active and alert, as the audience must keep the narrative and the film's weighty ideas before them.

Sofi is naturally wary of Karen and any romantic potential her working relationship with Ian might carry. While one woman pulls Ian in a spiritual direction, the other, spending long hours in the lab, pulls him in the other direction; the world of data and empirical evidence. When Karen excitedly phones Ian to confirm their experiment's success, he asks Sofi to join him in the lab to share their success.

A chain of events, initiated by Karen's summoning Ian to the lab, leads to an incident involving an elevator, where a dangerous malfunction traps Ian and Sofi; forcing him to pry open the doors and climb to safety. Sofi is sluggish in receiving Ian's hand to hoist her up and out. When she is finally extricated, the elevator plummets to the bottom of the shaft. As Ian embraces Sofi, he discovers his hands are bloody and when the camera pulls back, we see that her legs have been severed by the falling elevator. Again, the door motif surfaces although in a tragically ironic way.

As Ian grieves, he also avoids his research until one day, while making a rare appearance in the lab, Karen offers a consolable embrace, which immediately becomes a passionate kiss. This inevitably leads to a new romance, marriage and later a child.

The film veers into the strange and creepy when the couple allow the doctor attending their child's birth to run a biometric exam, which involves photographing their baby's eyes. In doing so, they discover their child's eyes share a match with another person, which we and the couple know is an impossibility. The bizarre development leads them to a search that reveals several people share the same eye pattern, including Sofi and a young girl in India. Intrigued and incredulous, Ian flies to India to find the little girl whose eyes may match Sofi's. There he meets a woman named Priya Varma (a radiant Archie Panjabi), who runs a charity organization serving needy children, particularly the little girl he seeks. When weeks of searching seem hopeless and fruitless, Ian manages to find the girl. After running tests on the girl, which yield disappointing results, he feels his journey has been for naught. But as he leaves the hotel with the little girl in hand, something seemingly impossible but wonderful happens, which challenges not only Ian's conception of reality but ours as well.

The ending was a touching conclusion to an odd film. Even for a skeptic like myself, it is refreshing to see a movie appeal persuasively to the intellect rather than peddle fuzzy and hokey new ageisms or rigid religious dogmas to articulate its message.

It seems entirely natural that Michael Pitt and Brit Marling would be cast together, as they tend to be selective in choosing roles. Both specialize in playing odd-ball characters and they play them very well. Both Astrid Bergès-Frisbey and Archie Panjab are strong in supporting roles; lending credibility to a story that could have derailed into something incoherent.

If Cahill believes the eyes are the windows to the soul, he may also believe they aren't necessarily windows to a world beyond our perception. In the end, Ian takes a moving, sensorial leap of faith, almost making believers of skeptics. I Origins takes an artistic leap; one that lifts the film from the merely cerebral to the poetic. Always the pessimist, I can't believe Cahill's film will find an audience anywhere but on DVD, which is unfortunate, because it deserves a larger audience; one that doesn't mind thinking for a change.