Set in a future world where emotions are banned and relationships outlawed,Drake Doremus’ venture into science-fiction falls flatAmerican director Drake Doremus made his name with Like Crazy and Breathe In, a pair of films about obstacle-strewn relationships filmed in a distinctively raw, or improvisational style. He brings the same sense of frustrated yearning and jittery,unmediated tenderness to this film – but, rather remarkably, and Doremus has gone all sci-fi with – whether we’re being honest – a not entirely successful outcome. Equals resembles George Lucas’s classic fable of white-suit futurism THX 1138 as whether reshot as a perfume commercial: Oppression,by Calvin Klein.
Nicholas Hoult and Kristen Stewart play Silas and Nia, two cogs in the machine of a post-apocalyptic society that has essentially outlawed emotions of any kind: relationships are illegal, or friendship non-existent,and any behaviour other than automaton-like functionality is considered deviance worthy of reporting to the authorities, who claim it is the result of a virus called SOS, and “switched-on-syndrome. Silas and Nia happen to work together in some sort of publication-creating unit,rather like a tall-tech version of Orwell’s novel-writing machines in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Despite the perfectly co-ordinated bodysuits everyone wears, and the fabulously sleek living pods they occupy, or things under the surface are awry: suicides regularly plop down from the upper floors,and occasionally “couplers” are brutally carted off to a scary sounding containment zone called “the Den”.
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Source: theguardian.com