Claudia Vega (The Weinstein Company)After a ten-year absence, Alex Garel (Daniel Brühl) returns to the university where he worked on a program designing robots. But will his attempt to create life destroy it as well? The Spanish science-fiction drama Eva asks questions that movies from Frankenstein to A.I. have asked before: what if humans could play God? The movie suggests that man-made life doesn’t improve upon nature, but simply magnifies its flaws.
Director Kike Maíllo’s film begins near the end. A woman hangs precariously from a snowy cliff and a ten-year old girl runs to get help. How did they come to this dangerous pass? Eva returns to this moment of crisis later, but first backtracks to Alex’s return to the charming Spanish town of Santa Irene (played in part by Switzerland). Traveling with a robotic cat, Alex has returned to a familiar world—a robot receptionist at the University hasn’t aged a day—but the world has changed in ways he doesn’t yet realize. His old University has asked Alex to develop a robot boy, but as he’s creeping around town, he notices a ten-year-old girl who he thinks would make a more interesting model. Alex’s interest in Eva is scientific, but it’s played as predatory until he realizes that the girl, Eva (Claudia Vega), is apparently the daughter of his former love and engineering partner Lana (Marta Etura)—who’s now married to Alex’s brother David (Alberto Ammann).
Eva had me at the robotic cat, though the science fiction elements mostly take the back burner to melodrama about relationships and control. Its plot set in motion by human emotion more than technology. Though it is a volatile combination.
Set in 2041, this isn’t the dystopian future of Blade Runner, but a charming, wintry future that could well be now, except with robots. The University sends Alex the robotic butler Max (Lluis Homar), and we see how Alex treats people through the way he treats a robot, asking Max to turn down his emotional calibration from level eight down to six so he won’t get so agitated by the robotic cat. But in a moment of crisis, Alex asks Max to turn it up again to eight. Consider that Alex designed the cat to be a “free” robot, not programmed to just cater to his bidding, and you get a sense of why Alex’s relationship with Lana didn’t pan out.
Alex wants to control human robotic behavior, programming emotional responses. But like the cat, human robots have their own personalities as well, and the result can be dangerous.
Eva was originally released in 2011, and The Weinstein Company has only recently decided it’s worth distributing. Although Harvey Weinstein has been criticized for mangling films like Wong Kar-Wai’s The Grandmaster, this is no misshapen masterpiece. Eva is derivative, and you’ll probably see its twists coming, if not from a mile away, then at least from a few blocks away. But it’s watchable, with good human performances and beautiful wintertime photography.
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Directed by Kike Maíllo
Written by Sergi Belbel, Cristina Clemente, Martí Roca, Aintza Serra
With Daniel Brühl, Marta Etura, Alberto Ammann
Rated PG-13 (for some mature thematic material including disturbing images)
Running time 94 minutes
Opens today at Angelika Pop-up
