Turn Me On review – dystopia’s kindly new manners

The ironically named Joy (Bel Powley) is anything but; instead she and her partner Will (Nick Robinson) are calm and content in this neat little film which is essentially a musing on the difference between passion and contentment, via a retro-futuristic dystopia in which a pill is taken daily to tamp down those awkward big emotions that prevent life from running smoothly, but are also sort of the point of living.

The world these people occupy also satirises a particular kind of white-collar work and leisure environment – the sort of culture embraced by the companies you find in co-working spaces that are decorated so inoffensively that they have no personality whatsoever. (Think WeWork, or boutique hotels.) Everything is clean, everything is carefully tasteful, there’s nary a speck of grit to be found, other than carefully curated ersatz grit. Joy and Will’s emotional landscape is exactly the same.

That is, until they stop taking their vitamins. At that point, as in any good Adam and Eve allegory, they discover sex (in all its messy glory) and love, the thing we all think we want, despite its ability to figuratively disembowel you. Written by Angela Bourassa (If You Were the Last) and directed by Michael Tyburski (The Sound of Silence), Turn Me On is a modest but intelligent and funny addition to a motley set of stories (includes the likes of Brave New World, Pleasantville, and Severance) in which sex (or passionate love) is what leads to cracks in a contrived attempt to fix society and engineer the messiness out of human nature.

Turn Me On brings to the party a savvy sense of how to make that perennial theme speak to the current moment. Here, the tone of voice of dystopian authority is kind and polite, employing a register somewhere between a Better Help advert and one of those computer ads that is trying to convince you it won’t feel like work if only you have the right laptop. Sure, someone somewhere is trying to get you to fit neatly into a little box, but wouldn’t it be better to submit, since they seem to care so much about protecting your peace? Turn Me On can be thought of as an updated version of They Live, in which the monster is conformity itself.