Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Movies

‘I’ spy a bold new movie

“I Origins” poses a mischievous question: What should a scientist think if convincing evidence of a spiritual dimension to existence emerged?

The scientist is Dr. Ian Gray (Michael Pitt in an unfortunate bow tie), whose love affair with a manic pixie dream girl (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) begins in a strangely dreamy fashion when he spots her masked on a New York City balcony, showcasing her dazzling multicolored eyes.

As it happens, that’s all he’s interested in: He is collecting high-res images of eyes for his lab work, studying individual iris patterns — each unique, like a fingerprint.

His assistant (Brit Marling) dares to suppose that his work can lead all the way back to the secret of how eyes first developed — how the first blind worm acquired vision.

The question of how eyes could have evolved naturally is a perplexing question posed by the intelligent-design crowd that evolution theory has simply been unable to answer.

When Dr. Gray thinks he has solved the riddle, though, he gets pulled into even more perilous waters: reincarnation.

Part sci-fi, part medical thriller, part romantic drama, “I Origins” has a pleasing way of working expansive ideas into a suspenseful, twisting story line, even if it occasionally has to wrench the story around tight turns. (Would a Connecticut scientist trying to figure out what a fellow scientist nearby is doing ask the other scientist about her work, or simply hop a plane to India and hope to figure it out there?)

And as for that title, it turns out to be a toxic pun. Imagine calling a movie about deafness “From Ear to Eternity.”

Excitingly up to the minute, the film is a bold, impressive step up for writer-director Mike Cahill, whose debut fiction film three years ago was a ponderous and unsatisfying sci-fi effort, “Another Earth.”

Though the movies have long celebrated spirituality, rarely do they do so from the starting point of microscopes and petri dishes.

The attraction between the resolutely empirical scientist and his “spiritual,” hippy-dippy girlfriend gives the film an unpredictable quality: This is an art-house effort, so we know we’re all sophisticated and dismissive when it comes to supernatural jibber jabber, and yet the girl seems to be leading the way to some weird new testament or revelation.