Vision quest

Writer-director Mike Cahill’s first movie Another Earth was a hit at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival. Personally, I found it ridiculous and laughably bad, a Plan 9 From Outer Space for the art-house crowd. Consequently, I expected little from his new one, I Origins. But when the magic works, it works, and this film is a striking work of metaphysical science fiction. The movie blindsided me—appropriately, since it’s actually about being blindsided, surprised by what hits you when you’re looking at (or for) something else. That’s one of the movie’s clever little ironies: Its hero gets blindsided, even though his life’s work is the study of eyes.

Michael Pitt, cool and subdued, plays Ian Gray, a Columbia University Ph.D. student in molecular biology with a lifelong thing for people’s eyes—each individual’s pair as distinctive and unique as fingerprints. He likes to take pictures of people’s eyes, great staring close-ups of each one. When he meets a masked beauty one night at a campus Halloween party, he photographs her distinctive gold-flecked eyes, then becomes fascinated by her otherworldly quality and unplaceable European accent. There’s an impulsive sexual episode in a bathroom, but when Ian asks her name, she is gone, abruptly and without a backward glance.

Ian returns to his university research, which is focused (pun intended) on eyes. Not human eyes this time, but the primitive, rudimentary eyes of worms. Vision, Ian says, is the one thing nearly all religions point to as proof of intelligent design in the universe. Working with his research partner Kenny (Steven Yeun) and their lab assistant Karen (Brit Marling, whose cool demeanor matches Pitt’s), Ian sets a goal of seeing if, by gene-splicing and manipulation, he can induce ocular development in a species of worm that has the basic genetic material but has never evolved a sense of sight. Ian believes that by doing so he can disprove the existence of intelligent design—of God, of you will. (The idea that he might do just the opposite, by becoming himself an intelligent designer, is a subtle irony that never occurs to him.)

Ian is unable to shake the memory of that masked woman at the party with the gold-flecked eyes. With no clue to her identity except the pictures he took of her eyes, he manages—by luck or fate—to find her. She’s Sofi (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), and she has the sort of impulsive spirituality that Ian lacks. She felt at first sight, she says, that somehow she knew Ian from a past life. “I don’t believe in that,” he tells her. “I’m a scientist, I believe in proof.” Yet something in the cool, methodical Ian responds to this gamine, and he embarks on a delirious affair with her that—not to tell too much—comes to a ghastly end on their wedding day.

While a certain level of horrified disbelief sets in, Cahill picks up his story seven years later. Ian is now Dr. Gray; Karen, the lab assistant, is his wife and expecting their first child. Ian’s grief for Sofi remains beneath his calm surface, which Karen understands and accepts: She is his intellectual match and companion, but Sofi matched him in a way that Karen can’t—spiritually, in fact, though he would never say it.

It is in this intellectual and emotional environment that Ian’s research, his preoccupation with eyes, and his emotional wounds converge, confronting him with ideas and concepts he has always dismissed—when he considered them at all. His research—his search, really—takes him first to rural Iowa, then to India, hardly the place to go to avoid matters spiritual. There he poses a question to a woman he meets on his quest: “What would you do if something scientific disproved your spiritual beliefs?” She turns it back on him: “What would you do if something spiritual disproved your scientific beliefs?”

I Origins and its skeptical, questing hero reminded me of Robert Zemeckis’ 1997 Contact, from Carl Sagan’s novel. The central conundrum is much the same: What do you, as a person of science, do when something happens to you, but you can neither prove nor replicate?

There’s a word for that, Mr. Scientist. It’s called faith, and it’s one of the “more things in heaven and earth” that Hamlet warned Horatio about.