Review: Womb, aka Clone
By William Pattison, aka Eric Morse
For Horror Bob Blog
For my review this time I’ve got an art house Sci Fi film from filmmaker Benedek Fliegauf, Womb, also known as Clone.
This film tells the story of Rebecca (played by Eva Green, Tim Burton’s Dark Shadows) and her life long friend and love of her life Thomas (played by Matt Smith, the current Doctor Who). When Thomas is hit and killed by a car while parking along the side of the road so Rebecca could go take a pee, Rebecca out of guilt and the fact that she can’t live without Thomas decides to clone Thomas and uses her body to bring about Thomas’s rebirth. As the film progresses we see Thomas grow up thinking that Rebecca as his mother. We also see Rebecca’s torture as Thomas grows into a man and his interest turns to other woman. Things fall apart when the original Thomas’s mother shows up and sees the clone. She doesn’t say a work, but looks on to her dead son with pain and walks away. Now Rebecca has to face the fact that she has kept Thomas’s origins from him and now Thomas is asking some very uncomfortable questions.
This film mostly takes place in a muddy moor area with a single house on stilts in the middle of nowhere. The only high technology presented in this film is a couple of Apple laptops and a small creepy interactive robot dinosaur that Thomas and a friend ends up burying alive. Even Rebecca giving birth to Thomas isn’t even shown. Eva Green gives a very quiet and rather drab performance as Rebecca. Her performance is very subtle but is affective. The main problem I had with Matt Smith’s performance as Thomas was that it was pretty much his character from Doctor Who without the wardrobe and police box. There was only a couple of scenes where Smith actually showed a bit of anger but mostly he is just jabbery.
This film is definitely not for your common sci fi fan. Unless you are a fan of slow burning art house films that are bare bones seventy-five percent technology free and mostly character driven you will not enjoy this film at all.
