Critic Reviews

Visually, it’s a total feast for the eyes, contrasting art-deco pinks and mint greens against sterile, symmetrically framed expanses of white, vaguely evoking the aesthetic of some lost sci-fi film of the ’70s.

An artfully unnerving, austerely hypnotic horror movie about a very sinister plant.

Read as a loose adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Little Joe is a gripping and visually striking satire of essentialist maternal instinct and the contemporary anxiety of wellbeing.

For some, Little Joe may seem too sterile to engage emotionally, but I found it glassily unsettling – even more so on second viewing. Inhale at your peril.

Any similarities to Little Shop of Horrors are superseded by similarities to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, as the story becomes less about a mutated plant and about the lengths people will go to in order to achieve happiness, real or manufactured.

Jessica Hausner confidently expresses a thorny and disturbing theme, though perhaps with too much confidence.

If Little Joe’s message is never less than apparent, it avoids hitting you over the head with it. It’s a movie that grows on you, planting a seed that only comes to flower long after the closing credits.

Boldly synthetic in its approach, in everything from colour palette to performance style, this film won’t be for everyone. And the fact that it defies easy categorisation might present a marketing challenge. But for those who engage with it, this oddly off-kilter piece of storytelling should exert a pull every bit as mesmerising as any genetically modified mood-enhancing shrub.

[A] sci-fi head trip ... If the film can be somewhat unsubtle in its thematic questions, it matches that with an equally loud color palette – and you know what, that’s perfectly fine.

This is a quietly insinuating picture with, by my estimation, one good jump scare, a lot of queasy chuckles and an overall atmosphere of slow, creeping, heavily perfumed rot.