I Origins

A Ph.D. student in molecular biology (Michael Pitt) with a fascination with people's eyes—he's taken thousands of photos of them—meets a mysterious young woman (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), then loses her on their wedding day. Six years later, he's married to his former lab assistant (Brit Marling), and their joint research into ocular evolution leads him into almost mystical areas that his cool, methodical mind can hardly grasp. Writer-director Mike Cahill follows his first feature, the ridiculous Another Earth, with a huge improvement, a striking work of metaphysical science fiction. The skeptical hero's research—his search, really—forces him to confront ideas and concepts he has always dismissed, and he glimpses some of those “more things in heaven and earth” that Hamlet warned Horatio about.