Review: “The Trouble with Being Born” (2020)

Part of my São Paulo International Film Festival movie marathon – Movie #3.

“The Trouble with Being Born“, an Austrian-German co-production, sounded like an interesting idea. It really did. Its tagline is “Elli is an android programmed with memories that mean everything to her owner but nothing to her. The story of a machine and the ghosts we all carry within us.”. How can that not be interesting, right? The Ghost in the Shell and all that.

I do somewhat see what Sandra Wollner was trying to deliver – something about abuse and loss, and how nothing is ever really gone. During its festival rounds, it became known as “that android child sex movie”, which is really not the reputation you want to have. It was even dropped from the Melbourne International Film Festival. The movie is, thankfully, never explicit with its imagery, and, had it been developed further, it would maybe not have had that negative impact. But, as child sex dolls are becoming a thing, this movie would have benefitted from developing this premise more instead of just all but dropping it and changing settings. The lack of a more explicit and in-depth analysis of this deeply controversial topic left viewers confused and tarnished the movie’s reputation.

However, reducing it to just that is unfair to the writers and filmmaker. They did have a very relevant point, given our society’s increasing use of AI and development of life-like robots, but it got drowned by its “poeticity”. And, as we all hear in film school, it doesn’t matter what you tried to say, it matters what the audience got. I am against pandering to audiences at all times, but sometimes your own story is trying to tell you something about a path that is more interesting and yet you try to force your hand to something else – and I feel this is what happened. It would have been a groundbreaking movie if it discussed the morality of child sex dolls and creating androids based on real people. That narrative path was becoming increasingly interesting until it was abruptly disrupted.

The movie is beautifully and hauntingly shot, the android is disturbing, and the android’s dreams are a little stroke of genius, but it just ended up falling flat.