IN VITRO (2024)

4 stars

Plaion Pictures. Digital. 15th September

IN VITRO is a gripping science fiction tinged thriller from Australia.

A remote farm – early morning wake up alarm. Jack (Ashley Zuckerman) gets up to address the work for the day, whilst his wife Layla (Talia Zucker) grabs a few more winks. A headline on a newspaper clipping reads ‘Local Man Bets Big on New Tech’.

She is soon up also. Feeds the dog, then is painting a bedroom wall with different colour samples. She thinks of their son Toby.

Then an alarm from one of the farm buildings starts blaring. ‘Systems failure’. She rushes to help as Jack leaps into one of the large tanks. They winch a cow out – the computer shows ‘Animal Replication Error’. These problems shouldn’t be happening with the system and they will have to put the animal down. We later learn they are using a new method to ‘create’ cattle. A high tech solution in livestock production – an original cow is scanned and it can then be reproduced in as little as two weeks. Some form of cloning that helps in this near future world where it is implied that food is scarcer.

The day to day life of a cattle farmer is hard work. There are seeming tensions between the couple – the stresses of running a farm or something more? Layla misses her son, who is at boarding school, but with constant storms and bad weather, the internet goes down meaning she can’t even email him.

One night Jack collapses after an incident with some of the cows. With him laid up in bed Layla hears somebody (or something) moving around in the kitchen. When she checks, cupboards and drawers have been opened, so there was clearly an intruder of some sort. Armed with a rifle she goes outside to see if she can find anything and is attacked by a person in a hoodie who she can’t initially see – when her assailant is revealed, Layla is shocked by what she is confronted with. What has her husband done with the tech…? As secrets are revealed things escalate – to say anything more would spoil what transpires.

Whilst some of turns in the narrative are guessable this is still a compellingly told tale. Basically a two hander for the most part, both leads are excellent (especially Zucker) and make it believable and ground it in reality. A mystery that builds tension as it unfolds. Whilst it explores the process it doesn’t centre on it, instead focussing on the characters – small in scale but grippingly made by co-directors Will Howarth and Tom McKeith, who also penned the script with star Zucker. Also notable is the often creepy, thrumming music score by Helena Czajka.

Steve Kirkham