j* Movie Reviews 2019

Chimera (2018)

The first thing you should know is about ten movies called Chimera come out every year. The second thing you should know is this particular film is sometimes known as Chimera Strain and comes from first time director Maurice Haeems.

Then after that you should know that this is truly terrible. I can't explain this without spoilers and honestly, it's worth watching if you want to see a film that teeters un-nervingly between terribly bad and potentially quite good.

As an attempt at story this thing is an absolute mess. The gist of it is this scientist is trying to save his two children from terrible inherited diseases through stem cell research. The problem is that it is told in so many confusing dimensions. There are long parts of the film where you're not sure if you're in "the now" or in a flashback. This is further complicated by him being haunted by or hallucinating his wife and his cryogenically frozen children. Sometimes that haunting is happening inside a flashback. The final grandiose narrative issue is that with about fifteen minutes to spare the story is handed over to an entirely different character perspective altogether.

But you know what, I enjoyed watching it. Firstly it really goes hard on the science. It doesn't go super accurate on the science, but it does go hard. It really tries to make a movie purely out of the ethical and moral drama over life, death and foetal stem cell research. In the early stages there is a lot of biology talking, so if you're not up with your pluripotent cellular lingo you might find it a little like a foreign language. It's not often they offer a clear layman's explanation... but when they do it's usually one of the kids explaining it to the other and mostly, I think they're haunting at the time. It took at least half an hour to begin to understand about the present, the flashbacks and the haunting. But I was never definitely clear what was happening when I saw it.

The next thing I enjoyed was the amazing sets. These are some of the most labby-labs I have ever seen... I feel they found a real laboratory and then dragged in everything from any other lab on campus. You've got epic confusions of distilling type glassware with coloured liquids in fume hoods. Racks upon racks of bottles of animals and babies. All kinds of wrong pipetting. Blood. Medical bed sections. Operating sections. Dissecting sections. Experimental animal scenarios, even monkeys, briefly. There are some surprising dissection scenes. There are two main lab locations. There is this most excellently weird self-insemination scene where a computer screen flashes a helpful "implantation successful" message when she's done. There's also this bit where they're setting up for a party and it involves heaps of inflated gloves hanging in a space already filled with planets and space paraphernalia. They make a bomb with dry ice!

There's also this great dedication to crazy industrial type spaces. You know, like big pipes going everywhere and silo type things and giant fans. And weird cryogenic tanks, and more big yellow pipes. And concrete spaces. And a window all stuck over with newspaper. There's also these strange vault-type things that looked a bit familiar, I wondered if they might be ancient autoclaves, but in this they're being used to hold a whole lot of unconscious women as foetus factories to harvest stem cells.

Oh yeah, the layers of weirding. It's a pretty out-there story. Whilst we never really see much of the world, nor get an idea of the physical connection of the spaces, we do know it's whack. Stem cell research is banned but our wonderful Cruella type baddy is making her own and selling them on the black market. She's involved in this shady immortality research because her husband is terrifyingly disfigured. She also has this excellently tall female security guard-thug.

Our main science guy, in his quest to perfect cryogenics, has hordes of cloned pet dogs and the kids have a massive dead cloned-dog cemetery. He also keeps his own dead (not dead?) wife in a coma so he can harvest her oocytes... which he splices with jellyfish DNA and his own gametes, thus creating embryonic specials he just keeps in his big lab freezer. There's also tanks of jellyfish floating around and occasional issues with salamanders crawling on faces.

There's a weird dichotomy in that there are lots of good roles for women in this film, but also an a high number of exposed breasts... like honestly there's boobs with blood and gore and boobs with heads on chests and then boobs running nude through the parking lot... Did I mention the main science guy's name is Quint but the the way half the characters say it I hear it all wrong?

It's like there was so much potential in here for an excellent film but it just didn't come out right.

J* gives it 3 stars

But you should know that 2 of those stars are purely for sciencey-aesthetic reasons.

PS. It's probably gone quite high up my list of favourite bad films... but for weird reasons. It's not really so bad it's good, it's kind of more it was so good but it's still bad. Not bad enough to be good-bad, but so good it's bad-good?