First-time feature director Fleur Fortuné comes to Toronto with a high-concept sci-fi of the old school. It’s a speculative and futurist contrivance that’s elegant, amusing, discomfiting and just the right side of preposterous. It’s an absurdist psychodrama of planned parenthood which mixes Brave New World with a little bit of Abigail’s Party.
The scene is a part of planet Earth salvaged or cordoned off from the rest of the world which was long ago destroyed by climate change. This fiercely protected and controlled new temperate zone is populated by the upper echelons of society. Criminals and undesirables are exiled to the ravaged and parched wasteland left behind: the “old world”. But the new-world elite must conform to the edicts of a blandly authoritarian government and one of the most important rules is that, due to finite resources, couples wanting children have to submit to an “assessment” of their relationship and babies have to be grown ex utero from the applicants’ genetic materials.
