Tagline:
Every living person on this planet has their own unique pair of eyes. Each their own universe.

Wide Release Date:
July 18, 2014

Directed by:
Mike Cahill
Written by:
Mike Cahill
Produced by:
Mike Cahill, Hunter Gray, Alex Orlovsky

Starring:
Michael Pitt
Brit Marling
Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey
Steven Yeun
Archie Panjabi

PREGAME THOUGHTS

My dad has been recommending I Origins repeatedly since 2014. Every time he mentions it, I check all seventeen of the streaming services that I’m currently subscribed to and it’s always no dice. This time, though, I was scanning through Hulu WITH HBO MAX HOOK-UP and I found it. Hell yeah, son. Let’s finally watch this thing and be gravely disappointed!

THE 650(ish)-WORD SYNOPSIS

Ian Gray (Michael Pitt) is obsessed with eyeballs. He’s so obsessed with eyeballs that he spends his life researching eyeballs. He has taken thousands of pictures of people’s eyeballs like a total creepazoid. Gag me with a spoon, y’all. He works with his research partner Kenny (Steven Yeun) and his lab assistant Karen (Brit Marling). Ian seems like kind of a dick.

At a Halloween party, Ian encounters a woman named Sofi (Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey) masked up with exposed eyes. They’re light blue with hazel spots. Ian’s like “these are the eyes right here”. He and the mysterious Sofi woman have sex in a bathroom. She leaves without revealing her face, probably because she’s some sort of horrible burn victim. Or she’s playing hard to get.

These could be anyone’s eyes! These could be everyone’s eyes! These are everyone’s eyes!

After a sequence of (unfortunate events) mysterious happenstances, Ian is led BY FATE or God or something to a billboard showing a closeup of a woman’s light blue, hazel-spotted eyes. In another convenient happenstance, Ian finds Sofi on the train and does this weird thing where he puts his headphones on her out of nowhere and then follows her, led by the cord of his headphones, off the train onto the platform. After keeping her back turned to him for about 45 seconds, she suddenly turns around and they kiss. A relationship has been formed just like that. *snaps fingers* *breaks thumb*

Ian and Sofi enjoy many passionate days of science/spiritualism debates and showing each other their nipples. One day they decide to go down to the courthouse and get married, but the spontaneity is ruined by the 24-hour waiting period. Karen calls Ian with some great news about their research, and Ian decides to take Sofi down to his lab where he and Karen are working on creating an eye from scratch using blind worms for some reason. Sofi thinks this is kind of cruel, and she and Ian have another science/spirituality debate; says he’s playing God. Ian’s all like “oh yeah, would God do THIS?!” *poops on her face*

I’d know those eyes anywhere! They’re the ones from that billboard!

Ian accidentally gets formaldehyde in his eyes, which blinds him temporarily. Sofi offers to take Ian home and the two get stuck in an elevator between floors in his building. Through the doors he is able to hoist himself up, but when he helps Sofi the elevator starts moving and again chops her in half from the waist down. Dead. He spends much time grieving and avoiding work, but Karen eventually convinces him to return. They kiss.

Seven years later Ian and Karen are married and expecting, but Ian still has feelings for Sofi (he even tries jerkin’ it to some old videos he found of them on his computer). Karen is sympathetic toward this, and hazards to think that maybe she’d still be alive if Karen hadn’t called Ian down to the lab that day.

When their baby is born, the hospital scans his eyes for their database and discovers a match with a dead black man named Paul Edgar Dairy from Idaho. Another day, the hospital calls for more tests related to “possible autism”, but it appears to be some kind of secret reincarnation study.

Choose the correct one or you’re racist!

Ian’s buddy Kenny had invented the hospital’s eyeball-scanning system and allows Ian and Karen to tinker with it themselves. After feeding the machine some of Ian’s eyeball pictures, they decide to scan in Sofi’s eyes and discover that her eyes were scanned into the system in India three months ago. Almost seven years after Sofi’s death.

Ian fucks off to India to look for the owner of Sofi’s eyeballs. He finds a girl named Salomina (Kashish Kumari) with a match: light blue with hazel spots. He takes Salomina to his building in India — taking the stairs — where he starts administering the same reincarnation study that his hospital had. It ends with a 44% success rate. Basically random.

Disprited, Ian picks the girl up and carries her to the elevator. Out of nowhere, she starts panicking and crying, wordlessly begging to avoid the elevator. Understanding, but disbelieving, Ian takes Salomina down the stairs instead.

TOM’S DISCUSSION CORNER

TOPIC 1 — General Movie Thoughts

I was marginally disappointed. After all the hype from my dad I was expecting another Ex Machina. What I got was something a little more spiritual and a little less existential, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I’m personally not spiritual, and God knows I get off on the existentialism, so this movie wasn’t tailor-made for me to get all goofy about. It did work, though! The ending with the girl and the elevator did make me feel things. For someone not at all spiritual, that’s pretty incredible.

I didn’t start out impressed. I found the first 45 minutes or so lackluster and unengaging. Michael Pitt as Ian is smug, obnoxious, and, frankly, not interesting or attractive enough to catch the attention of Sofi in my opinion. Perhaps this was the point, though, that he was rather arrogant when he met Sofi. He’s way more tolerable seven years later after settling down. But, man, these two were all over each other and I didn’t get it. Why settle, Sofi? Why settle? You’re just going to get cut in half by an elevator the day before you get married! lol! Brit Marling as Karen gives a deadpan, dry performance as the “intelligent scientist lady” which I also found kind of obnoxious. Women in science speak in a monotone voice, of course! Sofi was Ian’s manic pixie dream girl. Very one-dimensional. And that’s the cast!

Leave us alone, we’re trying to invent Mountain Dew.

Once we get past the elevator incident, though, the movie picks up. Ian spent a bit of time arguing with Sofi about science vs. spiritualism, and this comes into play later with the second half of the movie’s theme of reincarnation. It takes a possibility that part of Sofi still exists in another human being for Ian to start really giving a shit about manners other than science. TRUE LOVE, BABY. THE HEADIEST ELIXIR. Ian’s trip to India was the high point of the movie, so I’m here to officially say that the movie continuously gets better as it progresses to the end. ANOTHER POSITIVE! The little girl playing Salomina was a shitty actress, but what do you expect? They probably kidnapped the first girl from Mumbai they found after disembarking the plane.

As for Steven Yeun? Who cares. He went to my high school. That’s all that matters to me with that guy, and that barely matters.

TOPIC 2 — Science vs. Spiritualism

SOFI MAKES A GOOD POINT WHILE WATCHING IAN TORTURE LITTLE WORMS IN THE LABORATORY. You don’t know what you don’t know. Those blind worms don’t even know what “sight” is. I mean, granted, worms don’t know shit about dick. And once (or if) they can see, are their little atom-sized worm brains even gonna be like “oh, that’s cool”? Nope. They’re going to see and they’re going to be like “huhhhhhhh”.

Anyway, Sofi’s point is that the worms will gain a sense that they didn’t even know existed in the first place. Have you ever heard of that thought exercise where 2D Bob lives in his 2D world with his 2D squares and his 2D triangles and he’s perfectly happy with his limited viewpoint? Then some 3D entity, let’s call him 3D Ron DeSantis, pulls 2D Bob out of his world and into the 3D world. Suddenly, 2D Bob is like “what the fuck there is no god”. Except there might be a God, I guess. That’s Sofi’s point. There could be someone out there ready to lift us up into their 4D world. Or even beyond!

Fuck you, I want your half of the secret Mountain Dew recipe.

Or it’s all just a bunch of horseshit. This is all dumb stuff we made up as a species. It takes us seven years to learn how to tie shoes, why would we be smart about anything spiritual? I think I’ve made my point. I’m going to go torture some worms now.

IMDb TRIVIA FUNHOUSE!

The famous National Geographic cover of the Afghan girl whose eyes mesmerized the world and who was found years later makes a cameo in the film.
I’d never heard of this Afghan Girl photo from 1984 before, but man is it beautiful. Apparently, though, heavy criticism was drawn for the public exposure of the photo: “It is not welcome for a girl of traditional Pashtun culture to reveal her face, share space, make eye contact and be photographed by a man who does not belong to her family.” So, in short, National Geographic really fucked up here and I’m cancelling the subscription I’ve had since 1908!

For a brief moment in the opening credits only the letters I and O are shown in the movie title. This gives “IOII”. In binary the number 1011 translates as eleven which is an important number throughout the film.
Boo! Don’t Care! Boring! What’s next??

One minute into the movie, Ian is sitting in front of his computer. The screen shows a picture that looks a bit like an eye. It is in fact a well known image of the so-called Cat’s Eye Nebula, taken by NASA with the Hubble space telescope.
From what I’ve gathered from both context and extensive internet research, I’ve deduced that eyes are a huge theme of this movie! Thank you, IMDb Trivia. The gift that keeps on giving.

The book Ian is reading in the cafeteria is called The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.
Richard Dawkins is for 16-year-olds. Read some Nietzsche.

Film running time is 1 hour 46 minutes long, which adds up to 11, continuing the theme of ’11’s throughout.
1 hour and 46 minutes adds up to 11? What the fuck is this shit?

Sofi’s eyes belong to Astrid Bergès-Frisbey, and they were digitally added to Kashish, who plays Salomina, who has black eyes in real life.
Child abuse! Call the Feds! But seriously, black eyes? Sounds like child abuse! But seriously,

Nice job trying to cover up those black eyes. I’m on to your game.

IS IT WORTH A WATCH?

Yeah, but just once. I wasn’t blown away by the story, and the first 40 or so minutes of the love story was a little bit too blah. The rest of the movie after Sofi gets cut in half by the elevator are tops, though! A character had to die to move things along. Spoiler alert.