TIFF 2015: Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult Heat Up the Chilly Sci-Fi Romance 'Equals'

Kristen Stewart in ‘Equals’ (Photo: TIFF)

Even if you’re not a sci-fi fan, the stultifying utopia depicted in the new movie Equals — which screened this week at the Toronto International Film Festival — will certainly seem familiar. With its all-white design scheme, glossy touch-screen technology, and friction-free inter-personal transactions, the future-world of Equals looks like a massive Apple showroom. It’s a chilly, seamlessly run megapolis, and the last place where one would expect a vivid romance. But thanks to Kristen Stewart and Nicholas Hoult — who play repressed worker-drones who, against the rules of law and biology, strike up a slow-burn relationship — Equals is an aching depiction of first love and one that makes good use of both actors’ innate emo-ness.

Equals was written and directed by Drake Doremus, whose 2011 breakthrough, Like Crazy, was a painfully authentic tale of a fizzling but hard-fought long-distance relationship. Equals gets at that same ache, but this time, there are no geographical barriers in anyone’s way — just “progress.” The movie’s set in an unnamed time, after a globe-shattering war that divided the world into two camps: the Collective, where Nia (Stewart) and Silas (Hoult) work in a sort of ministry of information and a far-off peninsula where other survivors supposedly once lived in the wild.

Nicholas Hoult and Kristen Stewart in ‘Equals’

Thanks to the Collective’s efforts, everything from cancer to the common cold has been cured, but basic human emotions have been weeded out of mankind’s very biology, and love and sex are forbidden. As a result, the Collective is full of shiny, good-looking workers who are neither happy nor despondent; they just carry out their vague duties, commute on the trains (which always run on time), and wear their monochrome uniforms, all while listening to a soothing voice-over from unseen overseers. It’s the same sort of high-gloss, highly stylized Orwell-meets-Ikea future-world that’s been seen in everything from THX 1138 to Sleeper to Gattaca, only with better LED screens.

Like all Collective residents, Nia and Silas live in fear of contracting Switched-on-Syndrome (SOS), a debilitating condition in which their emotions return, forcing the victims to march off to a secluded prison or casually commit suicide. You can guess within two minutes of this set-up where Equals is going, and sure enough, Nia and Silas are soon “sick” with feeling, and falling desperately, dangerously in love — a turn of events they have to keep covered up.

Watch a clip from ‘Equals’ below:

The two soon begin communicating in fleeting, fragile movements: Stewart’s lips, often shot in close-up, quiver with fear, and her gaze turns into a slow burn (the actress’s half-lidded stare hasn’t been put to such effective use since the early Twilight films); Hoult, meanwhile, dims the bright smile of his Skins days, masking his face in a dry inexpressiveness that increasingly can’t hide his desires. When they finally hook up in a bathroom stall, shot in silhouette, it’s both charmingly chaste and feverishly steamy.

Equals ultimately has too many ideas about technology — and about medicine and conformity and all-white color schemes — to satisfy its sci-fi aspirations. The movie’s vision of the future is neither too far-flung nor too at-hand to instill any real fear or surprise. But Stewart and Hoult are perfectly cast specimens, their arctic demeanors slowly revealing every crack and fissure until they burn with an appropriately white heat.