CLONE is a low budget relationship drama with a science fiction twist imposing a moral dilemma on the story: a young woman's boyfriend dies in a horrific car accident, and she then decides to have him cloned, bearing the clone herself in her own womb, thus giving birth to both her son and her replicated boyfriend at the same time. It's an interesting, psychologically complex story for sure, ending on a shocking but inevitable note, but the execution is far from what I hoped. This plays out as a slow burner with a minimum of drama and tension, instead focused on peripheral characters and performances. Eva Green is very good as she always is, but the rest are less assured and Matt Smith ends up resorting to his DR WHO schtick, which is quite the embarrassment. It should have been better.

Eva Green's lover dies and she gives birth to his clone, guides him through childhood and into manly youthfulness as she herself grows older but not less caring. Trouble ensues when Matt Smith brings home a cute and vivacious girl friend, Hannah Murray, and the three of them live together in a ramshackle cottage on stilts on the shore of the North Sea under a cloudy sky and amid the sound of a cold wind moaning about the structure, once upon a time.

The story is really simple. Green wants to reincarnate her lost lover so that they can be together again in every sense. (Mom doesn't approve.) But although Green waits patiently while the infant grows up, horny and desperate for love, the kid has no such notion. He has no idea his mother is also his lover, or once was -- or something. Anyway, the experiment fails, but not before Green and Smith have one last angry encounter that ends in a strenuous bout of physical sex. No nudity, though. Don't worry. Nobody's going to undress in THAT climate.

The story moves slowly and it depends almost entirely on Eva Green's ability to deliver myriad complicated emotions without much dialog. She does fine. If she were a toy instead of an actress she'd be made of PlayDo. There is a scene between her and Murray. The camera lingers on the back of Green's long raven hair as she stare out to see, and Murray hesitantly asks questions from behind. Murray, happy in her circumstances, wonders aloud if she's screwing up the household somehow. And Green slowly turns to face her without answering but with her features frozen in an expression of bitter hatred -- and the expression isn't overplayed! Green was a very sexy and thoroughly glamorized Bond Girl in "Casino Royal" and an existentialist teen in Polanski's "The Dreamers." She's at least as good here as the brooding widow.

In an ethnological sense, the movie would be interesting if only because it puts on display the central issue of incest, a universal taboo with exceptions that only prove the rule. The usual explanation (nobody knows for sure) is that the role conflict that followed marriage within the nuclear family would be devastating. Can you be an authoritarian mother and a bed mate at the same time? How do you do that -- get on top? And can Smith really make the leap from a crafty child who must test reality once in a while and get spanked for it, to an ithyphallic adult male? Or -- well, when does the spanking stop and the intercourse begin?

Interesting but slow. Poor Eva Green, the reckless experimentalist. She winds up sobbing alone on her bed in a cold dark bungalow while a pitying wind makes the shingles sing a soft and voiceless lament.

Womb has a grand concept, but rather dull execution.

The film holds interest, but basically Rebecca sits about and watches her child, never confronting any questions and leaving his life a bloody mystery. She barely knew Thomas as an adult to begin with. In no circumstance should a child be raised by someone and then become intimate, related or not.