Swan Song wastes Mahershala Ali and a promising Eternal Sunshine-like sci-fi premise
Ali stars as a dying man who clones himself to save his family from grief
Film Reviews Swan Song
If you knew you were going to die, what if there was a way to shield your loved ones from the inevitable grief? What if you could make them continue to live their lives, unaware that you ever left them? That’s the Eternal Sunshine–adjacent premise of Swan Song, a new sci-fi drama set in a near-future world of driverless cars, virtual reality, and Minority Report-like 3D screens.
Cameron (Mahershala Ali) is a graphic designer who agrees to be part of a secret alternative cloning experiment after he’s diagnosed with a vague terminal illness. His doctor (Glenn Close) lays out the pertinent information: An exact replica containing all his memories, emotions, and experiences will seamlessly take his place so that his family won’t suffer through his slow deterioration. After two weeks with the family, Cameron’s clone will forget that he even is a clone and life will continue as normal.
A doting husband and father, Cameron agrees to the experiment in order to protect his young son, Cory (Dax Rey), and his pregnant wife, Poppy (Naomie Harris), who has only recently emerged from a deep depression following her twin brother’s death. But when he’s actually face-to-face with his clone, Jack (also Ali), he naturally has doubts—especially when a sudden seizure prevents him from saying a proper goodbye to his family.
Simply put, Swan Song would be dead on arrival without Ali’s dual performance, which manages to ground the film’s tearjerker premise in credible human emotion. Ali plays Cameron as a man who’s grappling with his own doomed fate while also wanting to spare his family from further sorrow; it’s a restrained, affecting turn that doesn’t suppress vulnerability. Meanwhile, instead of being a prototypical “wicked” twin, Jack is fairly sympathetic towards Cameron’s struggle—he merely wants to perform the service for which he was brought into the world. Ali makes him compassionate, albeit a little mysterious, as he finds himself attached to Poppy and Cory suspiciously quickly.
Yet Ali’s sheer charisma can’t save Swan Song from its general inertness. Writer-director Benjamin Cleary takes a “tell and show” approach to dramatic storytelling, with frequent voiceover or explicit dialogue underlining otherwise observable events. Ali and Harris share chemistry together, best expressed in their strained meet-cute, but their relationship is so sparsely developed that it’s difficult to get too invested in Cameron’s sacrifice. Emotions are constantly stated instead of conveyed—likely a deliberate choice, in light of Cameron’s inability to communicate his feelings to his wife, but still one that transforms Swan Song into a literalist slog to sit through.
Cleary deploys his small cast as mere narrative insulation. Awkwafina shows up in a few scenes as another terminal patient in the experiment, serving up both mild comic relief and mild pathos. Andre (Nyasha Hatendi), Poppy’s brother, also appears for two scenes to communicate the important information that he is Poppy’s brother. The compound in which Cameron and the rest of the patients live out their remaining days is run by a team of three, alongside many AI robots, which is a pretty funny explanation for indie film budgeting realities. There’s a lot of downtime in Swan Song, so much so that you might ask yourself questions like, “Is that a string quartet cover of Radiohead’s ‘Idioteque’ playing right now?” (The answer would be yes.)
What Swan Song really bungles is Cameron’s ethical dilemma. In Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman used his sci-fi premise to examine the ways anguish and joy are intimately connected and how people will put themselves through the inevitable former in order to feel just a hint of the latter. Cleary, on the other hand, merely grazes the disturbing implications of his premise. Isn’t Cameron’s martyrdom a betrayal of his family’s trust? Don’t the experimental team’s ostensibly humanitarian efforts seem like a cover for their capitalist motivations? What if the clones go off script? Swan Song raise questions it has no interest in exploring,
Instead, the film sets all that aside in a tale about how the burden of grief is so awful that it justifies mass deception. Swan Song ends on a disturbing note it seems to believe is actually heartwarming, somehow validating tech overreach and plain old selfishness at the same time. There’s nothing to ponder in the movie. Only casual horrors to either accept or reject.
26 Comments
It’s very confusing that there are two different 2021 movies called Swan Song, and both of them are getting some awards attention.
To add to the confusion there’s like half a dozen books called Swan Song, none of which this movie is based on.
I reject all Swans Song except the final episode of Supernatural season 5.
Oh yeah, Supernatural. What a great show that ended 11 years ago.
The one book I’ve read called Swan Song is by Robert R. McCammon where the world as we know it ends in an apocalypse and the good and the evil gravitate to different locations under different charismatic individuals but ultimately on a collision course to a final deadly confrontation.It’s basically The Stand but with (many more) nukes.
Put that way, Cura Te Ipsum, it sounds a lot like plagiarism — though a quick glance at the Wikipedia page assures me there very significant differences.
Yet when I made my documentary about creating a chorus of swans (via the methods displayed in “Steamboat Willie”), it got snubbed by every awards body and damned by the ASPCA.
This is also basically a Black Mirror premise, with minor changes. Honestly, the “sneaking a clone in to replace you” seems creepier than BM, while the movie looks decidedly less interested in the implications.
And let’s not forget The Last Starfighter. Back when a “Beta” was a badass alien android who morphed to resemble you then protected your girl without banging her and sacrificed itself to save both the girl and the galaxy… or something. Kind of a confusing side-plot really. I’m sure we’ll have it figured out by the time we get to the frontier.
Oh yeah, that was the one with Agent Carter & the oldest Weasley sibling, right?
This is also the exact same premise of one episode of Amazon Prime’s Black Mirror-esque series “Solos”, starting Anthony Mackie. Like, exactly. And Mackie acts his ass off in in it. It’s pretty good.
I think it was literally the premise of an episode of Solos, the Amazon prime anthology show. The episode has Anthony Mackie.
Am I part of the problem? Because I’d absolutely take that offer. As long as the clone does what it’s supposed to (which I understand might be a big if), I’d absolutely take the opportunity to spare my family and friends a lifetime of grief.
Honestly I’d do the same.
I mean, would it save them grief? Would it truly be you? Two twins are the same at birth, but very clearly not the same throughout life. Even though a clone may share the same DNA, they wouldn’t share the same experiences and memories that helped shape you.
“An exact replica containing all his memories, emotions, and experiences. . . “
I’ve seen the film and I liked it. One thing I really enjoyed is that it resists the temptation to goose things up with a worst-case-scenario plot twist, and plays the premise clean.The big question is, is Cameron’s life more important to himself or to his family? If he chooses himself and dies, is that selfish? And if he chooses them and “lives,” is that egotistical? I like that the film leaves it to us to judge.
But the thing is, you can’t know what might happen. What if your clone gets hit by a bus next week in front of your family. And then you’re still alive, though dying, yet they already think you’re dead? Or what if you die thinking you’ve spared them grief but then the bus strike happens the next month or year? I think when we try to spare others pain, we’re just trying to exert control over a life that cannot be controlled. We’re all going to die someday.
I saw this the other day. It was ok. It felt like Ex Machina meets Multiplicity.More interesting is that someone said that this was the first time Ali has gotten to be the star of a movie and that sounded wrong but I guess it’s right. That’s very weird, since he’s a two time Oscar winner. Of course, he’ll be starring in Blade soon too.
Yep, Stegrelo — two-time Oscar winner, two years in a row…both as Best Supporting Actor.The only thing I know he’s starred in was Season 3 of TRUE DETECTIVE.
I feel like Ali is so talented that most films he’s in are doomed to waste him just because it takes a great production to reach his level. (‘Moonlight’ being one such great production.)
LUKE CAGE managed to do well with him as Cottonmouth — until they killed him off halfway through the first season!You have to know Kevin Feige was kicking himself over that decision….
Wasn’t this the premise for one episode of the Prime show Solos? The one starring Anthony Mackie?
It’s called a see-say approach.
Five stars for its multiple merits. First, for the courage of all involved to just go there in the first place and do the film, no matter how uncomfortable. Touch to tiptoe in 2021 into any turf around life, death, identity, love, responsibility, and the modulations of moral margins in a world where real science really disrupts people’s paradigms all the time whether they like it or not. Watching Swan Song in a deliberately unprimed, media-review-blind state, I was seriously stressed that it would devolve into a dog-eared 20th century trope. But it didn’t. Phew. It feels like Swan Song came from a tenuous and fragile film proposal that wasn’t supportable from the boardroom point of view, yet it got done anyway and I just watched it. I feel reassured by that. Who knows? There might still be some (funded) space somewhere for films, stories, arts, images, voices, ideas, sounds, designs, visions, innovations, and life. Call me stupid, but I’m hopeful.
Agreed. I like that the film declines to get muddled up in the logistics of its sci-fi elements and plays out on an emotional level.