Director Jack Ferry seems to try his hardest to emulate some of today’s edgiest and most inventive directors- Darren Aronofsky, Danny Boyle, M. Night Shyamalan and Christopher Nolan. However, in trying to emulate these great minds of modern film, Ferry loses his sense of individuality, leaving the film to feel like a mish-mash of styles. It takes a lot of hard work to make dark humor, suspense, horror, science fiction and intellectualism mesh together in a standard length film, so it’s no surprise that Ferry comes up short of the Promised Land in his lofty attempt to do all this in a 20 minute short.
The film is a dark tale of what could happen if we could clone ourselves and transmit our memories to said clone shortly before we die, thereby sending our consciousness into another body. A young man discovers he is an experiment in such new procedures and struggles to deal with it. While the plot itself is fairly far-fetched, it’s pure sci-fi pulp at its heart. It may not be terribly original, but still a neat idea to expound upon.
The biggest problem comes from the lack of coherence between the many facets of such a procedure’s consequences. The only credence given to the medical ethics of it all comes in the form of flashbacks of an overbearing, doom-and-gloom priest warning us not to play God and tamper with the human soul. At film’s end, an overzealous doctor calls an associate and enthusiastically brags about this new procedure and how it can be beneficial to many, which makes it difficult to tell which side of the coin Ferry really stands for. Is he for or against cloning? In a short story, the reader (or in this case, viewer) needs to be able to understand the author’s intentions. Here, we don’t.
Also, some of the rapid-fire montage clips are very out of place for a story about cloning. Shots of surgery and open body cavities are needless shock tactics and do not belong. Cloning the man wouldn’t result in massive surgeries if all that is necessary is to transport memories through a wire to the brain. The use of these clips serves only to make viewers jump, confuse us and to get some adrenaline pumping. I found it to be a cheap tactic that took away from the story.
Other incongruities include his visions of the snarling doctor (Why would he look so mean if this was his pet project? Can his mind be read? If so, how and why?), the seeming Oedipus complex developed by the nurse who birthed his clone, and issues involving aging (If he was born and raised in the hospital, why doesn’t he have any new memories of his new childhood? If he was aged to the point where he attempted suicide, then the original mind would have countless years of blank memory space, so how would this affect the clone?). Not to mention the issues of funding, or the man’s mother’s whereabouts.
A good what-if film will leave you asking questions that are intriguing and possibly illuminating. In the case of A Reasonable Hypothesis, asking questions ultimately deconstructs the mystery and merely showcases its shortcomings. Jack Ferry was only a film student when making this film and, given time, he ought to be able to come up with his own directorial style and refine his ability to maintain focus and integrity throughout a film. This is the kind of weak, film student experiment that several accomplished filmmakers had to cut their teeth on early in their careers and get a good chuckle from watching it years later. Ferry may never hit it big, but he does show signs of potential.
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