Closer To God is a science fiction and horror film which is written and directed by Billy Senese and stars Jeremy Childs, Shelean Newman, Shannon Hoppe, David Alford and Isaac Disney. Closer To God tells the story of a scientist who successfully clones the first human being. A baby girl is born early on in the film and we watch as things play out with the baby, with the scientists and with the media.
Closer To God Trailer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qm-IQVG6Bo4
Closer To God Review
Closer To God is a science fiction film that explores the topic of human cloning and what could happen if someone was to actually clone a human in the world. It also has some horror elements as well, for when we are shown some of the experiments that went wrong.
For some reason when I was watching this film earlier today, I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable watching it from the beginning until the end. We start off by watching a baby be born and injected with a needle in its head! It’s uncomfortable, I didn’t like seeing people experiment on a baby, even though it’s a made up story and it’s not real, it doesn’t make it a fun film. I also didn’t like any of the scenes featuring the baby, the baby crying or anything to do with young Elizabeth. I just felt uncomfortable with it and maybe people enjoy watching that, but I can’t imagine who would.
The element of horror in this film is a bit high due to the uncomfortable feeling you may have watching Closer To God. There is another child in the film that is a bit older and is sort of a ‘clone gone wrong’ who makes a lot of noise, screams really loudly and keeps trying to beat people up. In the film this character (Ethan) is revealed slowly and he is kind of scary. Due to the discomfort I felt with this film, he was quite scary at times, not so much that I would have nightmares, but scary enough. Interestingly the film doesn’t seem to have any jump scares, it’s mainly just built up as the story progresses with some uncomfortable music thrown in.
It is interesting when it comes down to the scientific argument about whether or not people should be cloned or not. We get to see a few different interest groups state their case about the matter and there doesn’t seem to be a clear good guy and bad guy group. Everyone is fairly set in their beliefs from the beginning, from the main character to the religious people protesting against him, both get fairly violent at times as well and everything gets really tense towards the end.
In the end of it I felt quite opposed to the cloning of a person as I couldn’t see anything positive come out of the process in the end. Although the scientist has his reason’s, Victor who may be named after Victor Frankenstein, a story which this film seems to be heavily basing itself off, just doesn’t come off as a guy with good intentions. Victor is super tense, strangely lacks emotion and seems to be overly stressed. As our main character he’s someone you can hate quite easily, does he even have any ethics?
The acting was better than one would expect. While most will struggle to recognise any of the faces in this film, they all did well enough with their roles and the director did well to maintain an uncomfortable tone from the beginning to the end and I quite enjoyed the cinematography as well.
Overall Closer To God allows its audience to explore the concept of cloning and gives you a lot of points to think about when it comes to what could happen if someone was actually cloned. The actors and the director do well in the film and its quite well made overall. But I can’t get over the uncomfortable tone as well as all the scenes to do with experimenting on a baby, especially the opening few scenes of the film, it just felt wrong to me and because of that I can’t say watching Closer To God was a great experience.
