QFilm Reviews: EQUALS - Where Emotions are Considered a Disease

edje (69)in #movie • 7 years ago (edited)

In Equals we enter a clinical sci-fi environment. By a great war, the world is still a small habitable place where the new civilisation is perched. What's left outside does not really know anyone. Only there are half-erected buildings where a handful of people live according to the old standards. In The Collective, as the group of people are called in the new civilisation, it's another story: people live according to strict routines in extremely protected environments.

The most interesting fact in Equals is that people somewhere between conception (which is now being invoked by robots by the way) and birth are stripped from all kinds of emotions. Sometimes, however, those emotions come back in a certain form and called Switched On Syndrome (SOS), and considered to be a deadly disease and treated intensively. In addition, everyone in Equals walks as if they are on intensive care: fashion in the future consists of a white button-up Raf Simons shirt and laceless white shoes.

Director Drake Doremus made a clever choice with the cast. Both Nicholas Hoult (Silas) and Kristen Stewart (Nia) are delighted to watch and provide the necessary warmth in the particularly tight white environment, where blue neon light provides the only atmosphere. And when Silas and Nia, two SOS’ers, adds the emotions to the movie - even some red / orange light comes in. Doremus’s soft focus cinematography contributes to the creation of a dreamy robot society in which we came to terms. The story is mainly about Silas and Nia and their forbidden relationship, with the rest of the actors focusing on routine operations in this clinical world.

But even though Equals is a good movie, the story is quite thin and predictable. The atmosphere and the expressive thought that emotion is seen as a terrible disease that is genetically eradicated, in combination with the music (strings and sounds) drives the movie.

Equals is a sci-fi Romeo & Juliet story created well. But afterwards you wonder if it could not have been many times better. The environment and the cast seem to lend themselves to much more than Equals eventually brings. Yet there is plenty to discover, so go ahead.