Directed by Sandra Wollner
Starring Ingrid Burkhard, Susanne Gschwendtner, Simon Hatzl
The Trouble With Being Born has a concept that’s thematically rich, but is left underwhelmed. It tells the story of a lonesome man who keeps himself company with an android resembling a daughter figure for him. There’s the particularly icky (and controversial) notion that he is using her not just for daughter relations, but also for sex, which is hinted at.
As the film goes on, it splits from one story to another, then showing the notion of identity that this young girl android encapsulates. But the film feels like it attempts to lock onto too many aspects of artificial intelligence, all the while keeping these ideas too vague.
It languidly moves along in the second half, not building upon any themes in the first half, so the troubling aspects of androids being not quite human, yet not quite object are abandoned and hardly explored. This film is still an intriguing treatise on this robotic kind of existence, but its ideas are too scattered for this film to feel like a revelation in the pantheon of android films.
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN
