When the film was introduced in the festival I saw it, we were told that the controversies that happened on its first screening were garbage and that it would be stupid to see it as a pedophile story. But man is it hard to see anything but that !

The main official topic is probably human/android relationships, certainly a subject we'll have to handle for real in the decade to come. Are they alive ? What can they do ? Should they be considered as people ? etc. But it could certainly have been done in another way.

Apparently the initial idea was to the android to be 20 something and have even more explicit scenes. Well the decision to use a 10 something year old child instead is cringe as fuck.

So at the beginning, Elli is an android, made to replace a man's daughter after she disappeared. It could be at first seen as innocent as she is a child, or maybe borderline, but it's obviously more than that and everything is done so that you understand it. Nothing is actually shown, but it's really not far. Elli is almost always, in a bathing suit, naked, or lying down with her father. Change her to a 20 year old, do not change a single pose or dialogue, and it's already a cheap romance/erotic movie. Then it only gets more and more creepy as it goes on. He buys her a dress and makes her pose for sexy pictures. When he looks like he's cleaning her she sits naked, legs wide open and what he's cleaning is her tongue and vagina. Then there's the scene where she lies on the bathroom floor and as we hear him removing his pants it cuts to him waking up naked, head on her stomach.

So yeah, hard to not see the pedophile propaganda in there. The whole thing is very creepy. Yeah, she's not a real child, but she's designed to look like one, moreover his child, and she's clearly has been designed for the possibility of sex. One could hope that would not be the case the day child android are available for parent's grief relief.

Anyway, here comes the one interesting idea in the movie. Elli runs away and you can see androids seem to be programmed with a limited set of dialogues and memories and tend to reproduce the original behavior, including the one that lead to the original's disappearance or death.
She is picked up by a guy that redesign/reprogram her to act as his mother's long lost little brother. The mother is initially creeped out. Here, some of Elli's past dialogues come up, showing the limitation of the program. And again, he (as she's a he now) will reproduce the initial's child disappearance, [spoiler]including the fight that will leave the old woman dying on the floor, while the android just waits there[/spoiler]. the interesting point being that the androids are just programmed to do some limited things, and are innocent as they don't understand morale, sex, or killing.

But just in case you had forgotten the first part, or still had doubt on what was happening there, here comes the creepy part again: even with the new personality, the android makes sex noise in his sleep.

So apart from this small reflections on what the androids conditions could be, and the very creepy first part, the movie has not much to offer. The story is slow, not that interesting, editing is a little messy with some non linear scenes that seem out of place. Most exterior shots are only blurry or very dark. Not in an artistic way, enough so that we were wondering whether the projector had been calibrated correctly.

There's no real good point. It's not provocative or whatever, it's creepy, and the rest tries to hide it with an artistic vibe but fails miserably.

Deeply unsettling and thematically rich, Sandra Wollner's film is, most of all, thought-provoking. If you can push past the controversy, 'The Trouble with Being Born' will haunt you.
- Jake Watt

Read Jake's full article...
https://www.maketheswitch.com.au/article/review-the-trouble-with-being-born-controversial-unsettling-and-intelligent-science-fiction