Review of the movie "Swan Song" - a melancholic sci-fi movie about cloning
Mahershala Ali in Black Mirror-style sci-fi drama.
Cameron Turner (Mahershala Ali) fights a terminal illness. His condition is rapidly deteriorating, and he, worried about his wife, decides to keep everything a secret. Instead of sharing with loved ones, Cameron contacts the doctor (Glenn Close), who heads the experimental treatment laboratory. In a remote location from the city, employees clone their clients and transfer all their memories into the mind of a healthy "duplicate". The revolutionary method can save relatives from grief, and the clone, completely identical to the person, will not suspect anything.
Cinematography often reflects on the near future, where not the threat posed by potential robots is most often illustrated, but the possibility of new technologies to fill the void in human life. Such were the paintings "She" by Spike Jonze and the most recent German film "I am made for you" by Maria Schrader. Both looked at attempts to overcome sadness and rid a person of loneliness using artificial intelligence. But, if earlier the heroes were driven by rather self-centered motives, then the work of the Irish director Benjamin Cleary is developing in a purely altruistic way. The character of Mahershal Ali is ready to be left alone with his own pain (physical and emotional) in order to free the family from the excruciating suffering of loss. The camera makes the viewer literally find himself in Cameron's place: through video tracking in the lenses of a clone, he observes how the life of loved ones goes on without him. This involvement amplifies the effect of painful questions: "Would we make sacrifices to help our loved ones avoid heartache?" or "Can we mislead other people's lives for their own good?"
The action of the picture takes place in the near future, but the world around is built in such a way as not to distract from the storyline. Futuristic motives are organically intertwined with the tone of the story, not in the least suppressing the drama, but, on the contrary, helping it to unfold with greater force. Minimalist interiors and smart homes, where everything is laconic and clean, are contrasted with the internal disorder of the protagonist, which faced a difficult dilemma.
Typically, projects of this kind involve deeply ethical conflicts. We observe how a person interacts with a robot or other type of artificial intelligence and imbued with sympathy for the second, subordinate to the power of people. But Cleary goes beyond those questions. His "Swan Song" is not so much about whether heroes act according to moral etiquette and whether they go against nature itself, but about human identity and finitude. Can people continue to live "out of the body"? This motif permeates the entire matter of the picture: from the transfer of consciousness from one to another to drawings, where a person soars in the air. Corporeality disappears, and with it the pain: only memory and love remain, which does not go anywhere.
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