Replicas (2018)

Replicas arrives from 2018 with the confidence of a film that has nothing on its mind beyond the mechanics of its own plot. Keanu Reeves plays William Foster, a neuroscientist in Puerto Rico who loses his wife and three children in a car crash, then clones them back to life using stolen corporate equipment. He has three pods and four bodies, so he deletes his youngest daughter from existence and wipes his family's memory of her. This is presented as a logistical problem, not a moral one. The film grossed nine million dollars against a thirty million dollar budget and holds a nine percent approval rating. It has earned its obscurity.

The cast includes John Ortiz and Nyasha Hatendi in supporting roles, and their presence is treated as ordinary hiring, which it is. No character is gay. No one discusses the climate. Race is never a subject of conversation, and the screenplay shows no interest in making it one. Alice Eve's Mona exists to be a wife and mother, resurrected and then deceived; the film grants her no interior life worth the name and no arc beyond the domestic. Bionyne Corporation is the customary sinister employer, its research secretly a military weapon, its ending a scheme to sell clone transfers to the wealthy. The film gestures at corporate malfeasance the way a furniture catalogue gestures at a living room.

The film never lectures. It is a thriller assembled from laboratory sets and ethical shortcuts, and it races from one contrivance to the next without pausing to instruct anyone about how to live. There is no sermon, no moral, no closing address to the audience. The result is a film of almost pure narrative appetite, executed badly, and free of the cultural instruction manual that so many of its contemporaries cannot resist including. For that small mercy, and for nothing else, it deserves a flicker of acknowledgment.