The Pod Generation
Written and Directed by Sophie Barthes
Starring: Emilia Clarke, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rosalie Craig, Vinette Robinson, and Jean-Marc Barr
Rated PG-13
Runtime: 109 minutes
In theaters August 11

by Tessa Swehla, Staff Writer

I used to laugh bitterly whenever I received an email from my former university employers promoting wellness on campus. My colleagues and I were overworked, severely underpaid, and constantly asked to take on more administrative work “for the sake of the profession,” and yet, somehow, a free yoga class at the university gym or “taking a mental health day” were supposed to relive all my stress and depression. Have you tried to meditate? Decreasing your caffeine intake? What about holding this puppy? It seemed as if the university was willing to spend money on anything they believed would promote productivity except those things that would actually help us achieve a good work-life balance.

It’s this toxic wellness culture, this obsession with optimizing your labor potential through health hacks, that Sophie Barthes takes on in her sci-fi comedy The Pod Generation. The film continues a developing sci-fi subgenre which includes such films as Her (dir. Spike Jonze, 2013) or Timer (dir. Jac Schaeffer, 2009). These films are set in the nearish future–The Pod Generation takes place sometime in the late 21st century–and have what I’m going to call Silicon Valley chic: technological cityscapes populated by beautiful, well-dressed people and gorgeous lighting. In Barthes’ iteration, technology has infiltrated nearly every aspect of human life in New York City, especially in the areas of wellness and medicine. Contemporary wellness products like treadmill desks mix with advanced technology like virtual reality centers called nature pods (to help regulate mood), oxygen mask cafes, and ubiquitous smart assistants who can access personal health data at all times.

The film focuses on Rachel (Emilia Clarke), a rising tech executive, and her husband Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a botany professor and conservationist, and their journey to have a child. When Rachel’s company offers her a rare spot in the Womb Center–a program which offers surrogate pregnancy through artificial wombs or “pods”–Alvy is skeptical but ultimately agrees to go through with the process due to Rachel’s enthusiasm and her desire to have a child without interruption to her career trajectory.

The film–Barthes’ third feature–is certainly ambitious, taking on a number of timely issues like toxic wellness culture, AI displacement of human labor, gender roles in childbirth and parenting, impossible parenting expectations, cultural disdain and subjugation of nature, and even ableism in IVF. I’m not sure the film interrogates all of these issues equally well, but it does manage to effectively create a lived in world in which all these issues are interconnected with one another in complex and messy ways.

It would have been easy for this film to fall into gender essentialist talking points about women and pregnancy: after all, a central argument of the TERF movement seems to be that giving birth is a sacred feminine rite. However, this film does not fall into such traps (although there is a jab at “radical feminists” who are protesting the Womb Center). The pod technology does empower people who cannot physically give birth to have children–there are several same sex couples cooing over the pods at the Womb Center meetings–and they allow the initially reluctant Alvy to bond with his child in ways not possible with a traditional pregnancy. We see him performing what would typically be gendered biological roles in the film: carrying the pod on his body, cradling it protectively, ensuring that it receives appropriate nutrition. He reads poetry to it, takes it to work, and begins to spend more time with it than Rachel does.

The real target of the film isn’t biological roles or even technology itself. It’s the commodification of human bodies, finding ways to make money off of biological processes that have been free for hundreds of thousands of years. Babies become commodities, gestation becomes gamified, and pregnancy becomes a status symbol, a competition to see who can perform the best version of motherhood and feminism.

In fact, feminist talking points become part of this commodification as a way to sell pods, therapy, virtual reality simulations of natural environments, smart assistants, etc. “Isn’t so wonderful how Pegazus [Rachel’s company] supports women?” one coworker (Vinette Robinson) gushes to Rachel. However, like Greta Gerwig’s recent smash hit Barbie (2023), The Pod Generation cleverly shows the flimsiness of the girl boss veneer. While Alvy is congratulated for bringing the pod to his workplace, Rachel is reprimanded by that same coworker, who tells her that studies have shown that having the pod at work decreases productivity: “you don’t want to be labeled the distracted mom.” When Rachel’s productivity goes down, she is called in for a one-on-one with her boss, who seems perfectly comfortable asking intrusive questions about her health, relationship, and the pregnancy in order to identify the issue. After all, if the company is footing the bill, shouldn’t they protect their investment?

What allows the film to work despite its thematic overextension are the characters. Both Clarke and Ejiofor turn in solid performances, each inhabiting these characters who are trying to figure out how to create a family and what that might actually mean for them as human beings. Clarke’s Rachel especially stands out as a career woman caught up in the glamor of girl boss feminism. She is constantly in a state of FOMO, wondering why she isn’t experiencing the gratification and self-fulfillment promised by her job, her wellness technology subscriptions, and her pregnancy. Alvy, on the other hand, understands that the AI and wellness-based technology isn’t just replacing the natural world he loves so much, it is also ultimately not as useful as its proponents advertise. Alvy’s frustration and helplessness is palpable in Ejiofor’s performance as he tries to resist his own commodification in a world where it is mandatory to participate in order to access basic human rights.

The satire of the film is specific if not cutting, relying on such earnestly delivered pseudo-psychological sentiments like “men have womb envy” and “doesn’t the Womb center promote detachment parenting?” Much of the comedic heavy-lifting is done by Clarke’s and Ejiofor’s face acting here: the reaction shots are gold. In one particularly memorable scene, Alvy gets into an argument with Rachel’s AI therapist Eliza (try making that sentence make sense ten years ago), in which Eliza begins with a line of questioning implying that Alvy has a sublimated sexual fixation on her based on competition to gain Rachel’s attention and ends by trying to sell him a year-long subscription for more therapy. Ejiofor’s complete befuddlement and then eventual resignation is particularly chuckle-worthy.

The Pod Generation isn’t perhaps the most subtle sci-fi film, but considering the timeliness of its subject matter, maybe it doesn’t need to be. Like Barbie, The Pod Generation functions as introductions to these ideas, baby’s first feminism, if you will. The film certainly asks more questions than it can answer, but the questions are worth asking.