In Vitro (2024)

In Vitro had its UK première at the Glasgow Film Festival, 27 Feb 2025

Born in 1996, Dolly the Sheep was the first mammal to be cloned from an adult ovine cell, and her successful birth, though an extraordinary scientific achievement, would also engender all manner of ethical questions, as people around the world wondered whether it was right for humans to play god with nature, and to what hybrid horrors such experiments might lead on the slippery slope of genetic tampering. These very themes are dramatised in Will Howarth and Tom McKeith’s In Vitro, which the directors co-wrote with their star Talia Zucker. For it takes place in a post-Dolly world, on a remote cattle farm somewhere out the back of beyond in Australia, in a near future where climate change has devastated the agricultural industry, and the only alternative to “flavourless lab-grown meat” is livestock cloned, reared in growth vats, and made market-ready “in as little as two weeks”.

Jack Curtis (Ashley Zukerman) and his wife Layla (Zucker) run this farm together, with occasional help from Brady (Howarth). Jack is in charge of the scientific processes, and can be quite aloof in nature and secretive about his work (“You don’t trust anyone,” as Layla observes of him). This furtive privacy has given rise to a certain distance in the couple’s relationship. Layla spends much of her time alone, except during meals and the sex that Jack wants more than she does – and she misses her beloved son Toby (Daniel Ciurte), who is off at boarding school and, thanks to the farm’s poor digital connections, often incommunicado. Even as the frictions between Jack and Layla grow, there are other troubles at the farm. The cloned cattle keep falling ill and dying, and something or someone is creeping about the property. When Jack is injured, and Layla is left to keep things running by herself, she will discover something that will forever change the way she views both her husband and herself.

Given that it features beef cattle and a key cat-and-mouse sequence set in an abandoned slaughterhouse (prominently emblazoned with the graffito “No meat, no jobs”), In Vitro conjures the spirit of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), where changing conditions in the farming industry have driven another family to extremes in its bid to remain a coherent unit. Yet this is also science fiction, and as a new technology allows its users to rebuild an ideal life in their own image, In Vitro directly – if misleadingly – evokes Billy O’Brien’s genetic barnyard chiller Isolation (2005), while also cloning and recombining the DNA of Duncan Jones’ Moon (2009), Benediek Fliegauf’s Womb (2010), Brandon Cronenberg’s Antiviral (2012) and Infinity Pool (2023) and Bong Joon-ho’s Mickey 17 (2025) – or at least Edward Ashton’s source novel Mickey7 (2022). It is a twisty domestic thriller, staging (and restaging) the worst kind of treacherous, gaslighting abuse and the very deepest kind of love.