 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Equals • Year: 2015 • Country: USA • Director: Drake Doremus • Main cast: Kristen Stewart, Nicholas Hoult, Guy Pearce • Runtime: 101 minutes • Production company: Freedom Media, Infinite Frameworks Studios • TRAILER |
Equals (2015) is a film written and directed by Drake Doremus. I haven’t heard from him before, although he has worked with some known actors, I guess because he’s known for drama romances like Breathe In (2013) starring Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones, or Like Crazy (2011) with Anton Yelchin and Jennifer Lawrence. In his trajectory exploring the human relationships, he finally added the sci-fi factor, which convinced me to go for it, as part of the 49th Sitges Film Festival program.
He presents us a love story placed in an emotionless utopia, where human feelings have been eradicated, labelled as a disease. Kristen Stewart (well know for her role in the Twilight saga) and Nicholas Hoult (who played Nux in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)) lead the movie as the main couple, with a kind of cold-yet-close relationship, that increases in temperature as the movie goes forward and the emotions get more and more ungovernable.
I must say Kristen Stewart, so often judged as emotionless when she acts, plays here a role that fits her well, and Nicholas Hoult really gets the air of a cold gym muscles guy turning out to be sensitive, which although is not what I enjoy the most when I watch a movie, I admit matches the roles that are being depicted. The empathy is not big, but I’d say it’s acceptable and still according to the whole utopia portrayal. It’s not a movie about how beautiful relationships are, or how love wins, but about the discomfort of what society defines as perfection, so I find it a positive point that the main characters show this trait too.
The filming took place in Tokyo, Japan and Singapore – great examples of our society’s futuristic expectancy, being Japan one of the most advanced communities and where we can see a clear evolution of unfeeling masses focused on working hard and producing for society, forgetting about private life and individual needs. The setting and the atmosphere are therefore correct, as is the design used for the rooms and scenarios. Cold, impersonal furniture, and yet beautiful, clean, attractive. All those whites that look cold but are easy to use, to clean, to fit a general need in an overcrowded homogeneous society.
I think the main theme, the fact of stripping away humans from their emotions, is a very realistic and probable thing to take place in a near future. But most of all, I find interesting the fact of labelling emotions as a ‘disease’. How many times have we done this labelling thing, this defining things we don’t like and that become an obstacle for society’s evolution as “illnesses”? Because it’s just a definition, it’s words we decide to associate to things or acts, and definitions are relative and change depending on the people that use them. How many times we say the words “sickness”, “problem”, and then it automatically becomes one. And what is most frightening of all, the movie shows how we tend to quickly move away “sick’” isolate them and refuse them.
So, although it’s an average film that stays mainly in the romance, I think you can still find some good thoughts and critiques about our future as mankind, as in The Island (2005), or in the classic Gattaca (1997).
RATE: 6/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3289728
