In other words, the mood may be mild, bland and emotionless, but the symbolism is blunt, obvious, ripe. After the opening shots of blank-faced worker bee Silas (Nicholas Hoult) waking up in his pristinely empty flat, his bed automatically retreating into the wall and his closet full of white suits rolling out by itself, I was pretty sure I got the message about this society of functional, unthinking vacuity — and the poor guy hadn’t even left home yet.
Ordinarily, such shorthand would be a good thing. But not if that’s all you have to offer. Equals
To put it another way: We’re ready for the escape plan, the flight to freedom. But Equals isn’t exactly a story of liberation. (Spoiler alert: Escape eventually does figure into the plot — but it seems like an afterthought.) Rather, Silas one day notices his colleague Nia (Kristen Stewart) displaying some signs of anxiousness, and soon becomes captivated by her — and she by him. Initially, it’s fun watching the two break through the vacant monotony of their surroundings through the subtlest exchanges — a stolen glance here, a hovering hand there. The mood particularly benefits Stewart, who dials down her restlessness so that each shrug,
Director Drake Doremus has so fully invested in this stultifying milieu that I wonder if he hasn’t fallen a little in love with it. The world of Equals has a certain etherized beauty, true — with its eerie hush and its gray-blue backgrounds against which people occasionally pop orange. But we keep waiting for the love story to go somewhere, for the characters’ burgeoning awareness of their repression to result in … something. Anything, really.
And
Still, there is an idea here, having to do with the way that