Director: Benedek Fliegauf
Cast: Eva Green, Matt Smith
Certificate: 15

When my pet rabbit died, I didn't get it cloned, raise it as my son, and then try and sleep with it. BUT EVA GREEN DID. If, by rabbit, you mean Matt Smith. Yes, Clone is one of those films. Those incest films. Those incesty films with incest in them.

Rebecca (Green) is a young girl when she first meets Tommy (Smith). They bond over snails, sand and pears before she leaves for Tokyo. Fast forward 12 years and they meet again on the beach, only this time they stay together. Until he gets hit by a car. Then things get interesting.

Torn apart by grief, Rebecca decides to use his remains to inseminate a clone in her womb. Raising him in a society that frowns upon copies, she moves with her son/lover/scientific experiment to a dingy little hut in the back end of nowhere. There they live, somehow well supplied with food, drink and the Internet.

When Tommy starts to bring girls home (from somewhere), Rebecca tries to hide her jealousy. Standing in the corner, staring out the window, she resists the urge to go mental with a knife in a fit of Oedipal rage. A shame, because that would've been far more interesting.

It's not uninteresting, to be fair. The themes of moral and scientific ambiguity are fascinating when explored correctly. That's why Splice was a good film; it fused genetic harvesting with familial drama to disturbing effect. Cloning crossed with emo romance, though, has less of an impetus.

Breast-feeding Tommy and sharing his baths, Eva Green wears a troubled expression for most of the film. And so do we. It's hard to know what's weirder: the fact that Eva never ages, or the fact that no-one ever follows up on her post-procedure. 

Underscored by a quietly throbbing soundtrack, the characters say little if anything at all. It's a shame that when they do, the dialogue slips - one moment sees Matt Smith enter Dr Who mode, which only distracts from the whole thing. The result is one big genetically engineered mess. And switching the name from Womb (as it was called in 2010) to Clone doesn't change that. It just screws up my womb pun from the London Film Festival, back when it bored me the first time round.

VERDICT

Womb Clone is pregnant with ideas, but doesn't give birth to many of them.