Don Shanahan
EDITOR’S NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, films like The Pod Generation might not exist.
For this critic, the first thing that came to mind nesting into The Pod Generation was the chipper yet socially loathed statement of “We’re pregnant.” You’ve probably heard it and answered it with an eyeroll. There are overbearing husbands out there trying to speak a little unity and sympathy only to marginalize nearly all of the unequal circumstances of the pregnancy experiences between the genders by dropping the plural pronoun. Let celebrities like Mila Kunis give you and them an earful to help correct the aloof sexism.
This is where the premise of The Pod Generation flips the creepy announcement into a truism. The soft science fiction film which premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival is set in a not-too-distant future where one of the increasingly preferred methods for young professionals to start a family in a society over-dependent on technology is to grow a baby from embryo to delivery in a sophisticated and portable pod. Through this route, the physiological changes and risks to the mother are eliminated. The carrying and maintenance, so to speak, for preparing for childbirth are shared between the partners. The “we” of it all becomes quite real.
Game of Thrones and Last Christmas star Emilia Clarke is Rachel, a career woman working for a company of influencer services. She is married to Alvy, a historical botanist played by Salt‘s Chiwetel Ejiofor, teaching in a community of predominantly artificially-produced foods while growing and preferring the dwindling real things. They live a very clean, automated, and urban lifestyle of holographic gardens and vended nature walks and oxygen kiosks shot amongst the striking and kitschy architecture of France and Belgium doubling as a redesigned New York City of the late 21st century.
Pushed by recurring euphoric dreams about pregnancy, Rachel has had the itch to start a family for quite some time. Taking advantage of a company perk covering partial costs as a measure to retain their best employees, Rachel put herself on the waiting list several months ago for The Womb Center, the leading firm of artificial pregnancy. She did so without telling her husband. The tree-hugging and tech-adverse Alvy has long favored the traditional natural route of reproduction. When her queue number comes up, the eager Rachel and heavily skeptical Alvy go forward with The Womb Center process.
The pregnancy pod conceived by The Womb Center scientists is a completely closed synthetic vessel about the size of a watermelon. A fertilized egg is placed inside its sterile and optimized environment of nutrition, temperature, protection, and growing space. A cute and handy harness lets the pod be cradled and carried by either parent to workplaces with closets to hold everyone’s charging pod. Guided by a regimented program from the medical and counseling departments, everything about the pod can be run through a docking station and an app on a tight schedule all the way until delivery. The Womb Center’s level of customer support and contractual policies adds another layer of “we” to the family’s pregnancy.
Cold Souls and Madame Bovary writer/director Sophie Barthes has fleshed out a very intriguing concept. Thanks to the attention of detail put into it, The Pod Generation presents extremely tantalizing science fiction that evokes a bevy of thoughts and morals. Folks will undoubtedly catch themselves trying to fathom how these imagined proceedings would work and, even headier, if they could or would attempt this very journey. They’ll observe a world of peers and co-workers in The Pod Generation that, for the most part, has comfortably and favorably accepted this exotic technology as a new common practice.
That said, we’re still watching an affluent level of privilege from an economic caste above the commoners when it comes to who can afford these engineered pregnancies. Barthes’ film cobbles together one brief scene depicting a group of protesters shouting what we’re all thinking and the setting is seemingly ignoring. That fleeting perspective is underrepresented, meaning The Pod Generation ends a step or two short of addressing deeper implications that are on everyone’s mind.
As the gestational period progresses, The Pod Generation tiptoes towards a tipping point of viewer suppositions. Fronted by Rosalie Craig’s client director and Jean-Marc Barr’s visionary company founder, the increasing reach and involvement of The Womb Center, its designer genetic aspirations, and post-birth programs of private daycare and exclusive schooling flirt with corrupt indoctrination and monopolizing control. There will be a temptation to slap on the label of “too good to be true” and expect the worst, waiting for something nefarious or invasive to (at the wildest level, come out of the pod or) take over what is supposed to be a precious and life-affirming transition for Rachel and Alvy.
Instead of tail-spinning into potential wickedness and thornier debates, The Pod Generation remains focused on the fluid drama held by its two extremely solid actors. In lesser talented hands, the idea of watching a pair of performers like Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor trying to lug around a strapped prop, emote parental feelings to a big egg-shaped device, or explain themselves to narrating AI (voiced by Megan Maczko and Alix Dunmore) would be ludicrous and even laughable. Instead, these two are up to the task.
The real bonding to witness in The Pod Generation comes in the private moments and conversations of two future parents going through a drastic change of family dynamics. Even with the external placeholder egg in play, the nerves, fears, and challenges of trust and patience between Rachel and Alvy are not unlike those of the natural course. With Ejiofor blossoming the most, he and Clarke convey convincing emotions that slide up and down differing scales of attachment and detachment. Their characters’ sympathies and favoritisms shift and separate throughout the film, not only towards the coming baby but towards each other as spouses as well. By walking past the more provocative potential tangents, The Pod Generation respectfully picks its intimate path and still melds a unifying empathy that only a new child can impose.
