Zygote is a short film from 2017 starring Jose Pablo Cantillo and Dakota Fanning. In fact, they’re the only actors in the film. As it is a short film the plot is highly compressed and is, more or less, one event. I was about to say one scene but that would be to stretch the truth quite a bit.
It revolves around the last two miners in a mining facility in the arctic. He is heavily injured already from the beginning and is barely hanging on. They’re on the run from this monster, possibly an alien assimilating its victim into one large body of mass. Hence it has many faces, fingers, hands etc. It takes a while to really see what it looks like but when you really get a grip on it it looks really cool!
But there’s more to Zygote than a monster movie. I think most of the horrifying plot revolves around the social classes Zygote hints at from the very beginning. There are different societal statuses and some are considered more valuable than others. Some are meant to live and some are meant to die. We’re given the impression that it’s about artificial life forms but we later learn that it’s more sinister than that. There’s slavery and trafficking in a way and at the end the society and the big corporations are using a system just to save money.
At the surface we see an attempted escape from the monster or alien though. It follows them and there are a few effects that are really mysterious. They’re talking about an inner light caused by the creature and that it incorporates its victims’ thoughts and knowledge into its own. I think it would have been a good concept for a feature film but as this is just about 23 minutes long there’s really not time to evolve the story enough.
I still like it though. It’s entertaining and pretty intense. The acting is good and I think Zygote even transmits a form of desperation, survival instinct and hope for the human race at the same time as it’s condemning us to eternal darkness.
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