I Origins (2014)

Mike Cahill's second feature arrives with the solemn self-regard of a graduate seminar that has discovered grief. Michael Pitt plays Ian Gray, a molecular biologist cataloguing the evolution of the eye, who falls for a masked woman at a Halloween party and spends the rest of the running time negotiating between her mysticism and his rationalism. The film premiered at Sundance in 2014 and took home the festival's Sloan Prize for its depiction of science, which tells us rather a lot about the standards applied to on-screen laboratory work. It is a romance, then a tragedy, then a thriller about iris scans and reincarnation, and it commits to all three with a straight face that borders on the admirable.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is mostly inert. The cast is genuinely multiethnic, with Steven Yeun, Archie Panjabi, and the child actress Kashish Kumari in substantial roles, and a long stretch set in India. None of it carries an argument. The subcontinent functions as a backdrop for a reincarnation plot and nothing more, which is its own kind of honesty. Brit Marling's Karen is a capable scientist, though she is defined chiefly by what she feels about Ian. Autism surfaces once, as a possible diagnosis for the baby, purely to nudge the investigation forward. There is no environmental sermon, no class critique, no body-diverse casting, and no queer presence whatsoever. The film's cultural awareness extends about as far as its interest in the human pupil.

The science-versus-spirituality debate is staged through argument and heartbreak instead of direct instruction, which spares us the worst. A critic at TheWrap read the whole thing as commentary on American science education, and the film does gesture that way, though it gestures the way a man points at a bird he cannot name. The result is a sincere, uneven, faintly preposterous meditation on whether the eyes remember what the mind forgets. It asks big questions and then hands back a 44 percent success rate. We have seen worse. We have also seen this exact film, more or less, and it was called Another Earth.