Presented in a world premiere on the Locarno Film Festival’s majestic Piazza Grande, Electric Child [+lire aussi :
interview : Simon Jaquemet
fiche film] – the third feature film by Swiss director Simon Jaquemet – begins with the story of a family in-the-making, before transporting us far away, beyond the borders of reality to the heart of an artificial and technological world captained by a genderless and ageless child. The film opens with the evocative image of a waterbirth followed by newborn Toru’s first encounters with his parents, Sonny (Elliott Crosset Hove) and Akiko (Rila Fukushima). The former, a Caucasian man of unspecified origin is, as we’ll learn soon after, some sort of IT genius who’s busy developing a survival game aimed at creating a super intelligent creature. The latter, meanwhile, who’s of Japanese origins, is a mysterious artist and illustrator. We know practically nothing about the place where the story unfolds, as if, Sonny and Akiko were part of some virtual world which is incredibly hard to connect with. Either way, the harmony of the family is soon decimated by upsetting news: Toru is diagnosed with an incurable genetic disease and he only has one year left to live.

Like a tsunami which is as shocking as it is powerful, the news of Toru’s imminent death drives Sonny to overstep the limits of his own ethical boundaries as he seeks out inevitably devastating ways to save his son’s life. How far will a parent go to save their child? Is one single life worth more than the survival of humankind? These are the questions raised by the film, as it tries to imagine what might happen if pure technology and artificial intelligence met with the weaknesses and doubts of human beings.

A self-described “super-nerd, coder and father”, Simon Jaquemet depicts a reality with which he’s very familiar and which, we soon realise, is very close to his heart. But the coldness and desperation of his characters sometimes make it incredibly difficult to care about them: it feels like nothing in the film is actually real, not even the humans. We learn nothing about Sonny and Akiko’s relationship, or the latter’s life; the only clues we glean about them come from their mysterious apartment, which might just as easily be in Switzerland, Japan or anywhere else. But what if this blood-chilling inscrutability and coldness were a harbinger of a future dominated by AI, where feelings are nothing but a distant memory? What we can say with certainty is that the anxiety the film arouses stays with us far beyond the screening.

In terms of the audience reaction, it's true that sci-fi thriller and computer science fans will no doubt be delighted by the precision the director demonstrates as he investigates the possible consequences of Ai in our lives. However, viewers looking for deep and meaningful connection with the film’s characters might find themselves somewhat disappointed and might even find the special effects at the end of the film a little superfluous. What is clear, however, is that Jaquemet has pushed himself far beyond the remit of Swiss cinema’s usual offerings for mainstream audiences, with their hunger for scientific intrigue and Hollywood-worthy twists.

Electric Child is produced by 8horses (Switzerland) in co-production with Unafilm (Germany), Revolver Amsterdam (Holland), Perron X (Switzerland) and Epicmedia Productions (Philippines), together with SRG SSR and CH Media. International sales fall to American firm Visit Films.