Downsizing (2017)

Plot of Downsizing: Paul and Audrey are a married couple, approaching middle age, with no children and some debts. They come across a project which miniaturises people, and because their money will go much further allows the small people to live in some luxury in domed community. The down side is that once the job is done there is no going back. They apply and are taken on different routes through the downsizing process. But when Paul comes out the other end – so to speak – he gets a phone call from Audrey telling him she has chickened out, which alters his lifestyle, causing him to take a job and move to an apartment. He attends a party in the apartment upstairs owned by Dusan, and passes out, to find himself on the floor when the cleaners come round. One of them is Ngoc Lan Tran, a Vietnamese activist who gets Paul’s help to obtain drugs for one of her friends who is dying. Paul accompanies her to the slums where the workers live and discovers a whole different miniature world.

Content: There is implied sex but no nudity. Quite a bit of drinking and a bit of drug taking, which results in Paul ending up on the floor of Dusan’s apartment in the morning. In the full sized world possible candidates for downsizing meet up with miniature people in sales situations, and Paul and Audrey go through the process of purchasing their place in Leisureland. Once they are small the applicants are transferred to miniature hospital beds and wheeled into their new environment, which seems to be like and expensive closed society, but it in implied that there are other such place in different parts of the world, the original in Norway. Dusan has a friend Joris, who has a boat and on it they, including Paul and Ngoc Lan Tran got to Norway to the original settlement.

A View: This outing was variously reviewed by the critics, most of them saying that it was a good idea which did not quite hit the spot, and possibly as a result the box office did not cover its production costs. There is actually a lot to enjoy in the film, which is said to be a satire, possibly in a way because when companies downsize it means sacking people not actually making them smaller. I found myself imagining what carnage would result if a cat had got into Leisureland and how difficult the voyage from America to Norway, on a tiny yacht must have been. But I was not quite going along with the conceit. So, in summary maybe worth a watch just to see Hong Chau as the Vietnamese lady. She is terrific.

Fun Fact:  A lot of possible mistakes have been pointed out on IMDb, the most interesting maybe the fact that champagne would not flow from microscopic bottles.