Dr. Ian Grey (Michael Pitt) is obsessed with the human eye, one of the elements of biology that makes us unique and that religions around the world have used as proof of the Divine Creator. We all have eye biometrics that are specific to us, and various cultures have viewed the eye as a window to the soul or even the thumbprint of a creator. Grey wants to get to the bottom of the evolution of the eye, working with colleagues Kenny (Steven Yeun) and Karen (Brit Marling). Then he meets a model whose eyes essentially take him emotional prisoner.
At a party, Ian has a sexy encounter with a mostly masked woman named Sofi (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) and can’t stop thinking about her. He finds himself pushed by fate or destiny to a billboard of her unforgettable eyes, eventually tracking Sofi down and beginning a passionate romance with the woman who will change his life. While the preview for “I Origins” gives away almost the entire film, we’ll stop the plot synopsis here—it’s better if you don’t know much—but Ian’s relationship with Sofi sends him down a very different path than the scientific one on which he began. “I Origins” is a film about how destiny and love can lead us to different revelations than we could have possibly reached without them. Anyone who has known love can attest to its ability to forever alter a charted course and Cahill’s emotionally raw approach to filmmaking gets to the truth of that in a memorable way.
It’s also a remarkably confident film technically. Cinema has had a love affair with the eye for a century now and Cahill and cinematographer Markus Förderer take the timeless image of the eye and give it emotional resonance in the way they use it, balancing the film's two equally important halves. Cahill and his technical team wisely ground their film, only occasionally allowing it flights of visual fancy. We spend more time with Ian and Karen in a lab than we do in existential pursuit of a greater purpose. And that makes the film’s more extremely philosophical themes forgivable. Cahill's work here is a notable technical advancement over "Another Earth," proving he's not just a filmmaker with big ideas but one who can pull them off with visual confidence as well. There's a flow in the cinematography and editing that carries us along, only occasionally becoming untethered to a pretentious degree. Cahill’s smartest move was to not allow his film’s “big issues” to overwhelm the human story at its core. And he’s helped notably by yet-another strong performance from Michael Pitt, an actor who has shown such range just recently from his terrifying work on TV's “Hannibal” to this relatable, likable performance.
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