Low-profile science fiction, so light on the hardware, the décor, the couture of the genre, so mundane in all its trappings, as to skirt classification, operating in a borderland, a no-man’s-land, occupied by the likes of On the Beach, Lord of the Flies, maybe Daniel Petrie’s Resurrection, maybe Todd Haynes’s Safe, a short list at any rate, shorter on screen than on the bookshelves. Adapted from the acclaimed Kazuo Ishiguro novel, it is set in the near past in an alternative universe where medicine, post-WWII, has cured the incurable and life expectancy has topped a hundred. It is set, more narrowly, amidst a love triangle, two girls and a boy, at the private school of Hailsham in the English countryside, the “special” student body of which is bred for organ transplants, just two or three apiece before a premature demise. There’s a kind of wan monotony to the main performances (Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield), and director Mark Romanek gives the film a gray gloomy image to go along with the rueful yearning mood. While the pervasive monotony can get a little oppressive, a little imploring, the mundanity no doubt makes it easier for the spectator to remember that the principal business of science fiction, whenever it may be set, is the present day. (The all-hardware variety, which nowadays means all-CGI, makes it easier for the spectator to forget, prone as it is itself to forget.) Clearly, comprehensibly, affectingly, this fringe-dweller has something to say about the plight of disenfranchised people in particular and, for that matter, of people in general, our common condition. Charlotte Rampling, Sally Hawkins. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd
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