The Pod Generation (2023)
There's a particular kind of frustration that comes from watching a film fumble a genuinely great idea, and The Pod Generation had me feeling that frustration almost from the first frame. The premise is properly interesting: in the near future, couples can carry their baby in a detachable artificial womb pod, outsourcing pregnancy to a sleek piece of tech. That's a rich, thorny concept with real things to say about bodily autonomy, parenthood, corporate control over reproduction, the works. And yet Sophie Barthes' film manages to squander almost all of it.
The first warning sign arrives early, and it's a bad one. Emilia Clarke's character, Rachel, works for an NFT agency. An NFT agency. I actually laughed, and not in the way the film intended. It's the kind of detail that dates a script instantly, pulling you clean out of whatever carefully constructed near-future world the film is trying to build. If your vision of tomorrow already feels like a dusty relic of the day before yesterday, you've got a problem. And that problem doesn't go away.
The central dynamic, to be fair, is where the film has its most interesting material. Chiwetel Ejiofor's character, Alvy, gets to carry the pod around, and he bonds with it deeply and tenderly. Rachel, meanwhile, finds herself on the outside of the pregnancy experience, growing jealous and resentful. That's a genuinely clever gender reversal, flipping the traditional dynamics of who feels sidelined during pregnancy and asking what happens when the tables are turned. There's a real film in that idea. The trouble is that Barthes doesn't trust her audience to pick it up without being beaten around the head with it repeatedly. Any breathing room, any space for the viewer to sit with the discomfort and think it through, gets steamrolled by the sheer relentlessness of the messaging. It stops feeling like drama and starts feeling like a lecture.
Both Ejiofor and Clarke are doing decent work with what they've been given. Ejiofor in particular brings a warmth and vulnerability to Alvy that the script frankly doesn't deserve. But even the best cast can only do so much when the material underneath them keeps collapsing. The characters exist primarily as vehicles for the film's thesis rather than as people you're genuinely invested in, and that makes it hard to care about the outcome even as the credits approach.
Which brings me to the ending, or rather the non-ending. After spending the entire runtime circling these questions about reproductive technology, corporate interference in family life and what it means to connect with a child before it's even born, the film just sort of stops. It fizzles. The grand statement you've been waiting for never arrives. When you strip everything back, the takeaway is basically: pod baby, app baby, bad. That's it. That's the insight we've been building towards. I thought about films that actually commit to the implications of their speculative premises, films like Children of Men, which takes its sci-fi concept and presses on it until something genuinely human bleeds out. The Pod Generation doesn't have that kind of nerve. It flinches every time it gets close to saying something that might actually sting.
I don't want to be entirely dismissive. The concept is good, some of the visual design is appealing, and there are moments where the film briefly finds its footing before immediately losing it again. But a decent hook and a capable cast aren't enough when the script doesn't know what it wants to do with either. It's a film that mistakes bluntness for boldness, and repetition for emphasis. Heavy-handed, dated in ways that feel almost accidental, and frustratingly inconsequential right when it needed to land a punch.
Two and a half stars.
Rating: ★★½ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2026-06-12
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Hulu
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Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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