Writer/director BT Meza puts a lot of concepts into this Stepford Wives-esque slow burn clone horror that’s largely carried by Jessica Rothe’s solid multiple performances.
AFFECTION (2026)
★★★ OF ★★★★★ stars
We caught Affection at this year’s Overlook Film Festival and it’s now hitting VOD and I’ll tell you the thing that drew us towards checking this out is Jessica Rothe in the lead. Rothe, known to most as the protagonist Tree in Christopher Landon’s HAPPY DEATH DAY movies exudes effortless charisma on screen and is game for on-screen shenanigans. Here, in Affection, she plays Ellie, an amnesiac wife to Bruce (Joseph Cross) and a mother to Alice (Julianna Layne). She doesn’t remember any of them and as the audience we know something is up right from the get-go when the movie’s open features Ellie being violently run down by a car as she escapes. If you’ve ever seen Ira Levin’s THE STEPFORD WIVES (1975) you know that that film is a slow burn teasing a reveal about the nature of the women in Stepford that seems pretty obvious from the jump and that’s the case here as well. Bruce has tons of wedding photos and personal photos of Ellie that aren’t fake, videos as well and Alice bemoans how her mom sometimes doesn’t remember her and seems to disappear a lot. Plus, Bruce has a giant lab with futuristic technology in his lab and won’t let Ellie leave because of her delicate condition. Between that and the film’s poster, it’s not too much of a leap or a spoiler to figure out that Ellie is some kind of robot or genetically engineered clone and- surprise – she’s actually both. Turns out that in this world, people’s consciousness have been digitized and Bruce has recovered his daughter Alice’s and matched it to a cloned body and is now trying to do the same with Ellie. However, the consciousness embodying Ellie’s body is not the real Ellie’s and Bruce has to terminate her to get his real wife – and life – back.
That’s a lot of dishes to juggle in this film. Bruce manages to terminate the current Ellie and grows a replacement after burying the last clone’s body, but failed clone Ellie escapes her grave and implants the new Ellie clone with her memories she can get revenge for her before she kind of goes zombie. Meanwhile, Bruce plans to grow a new Bruce without the memories of all the would-be wives he’s killed. The movie I think gets problematic here, because it doesn’t really want to paint Bruce as a bad guy. He means well and that’s supposed to count for something since the process of finding the consciousness to match the clone is basically shooting fish in a barrel, You’ll get lucky eventually and who knows how many Alice’s he had to go through to find the right one. The latest Ellie clone just wants to end the madness, but her motivation seems lacking, since she’s basically given a life she wouldn’t have had otherwise and she doesn’t really have a reason to hate Bruce once she knows the truth. So it’s all a buit of too many concepts fighting for screen time. There’s an Australian horror film called In Vitro from 2024 that is very similar but I think fares better because the husband is a clear antagonist in that film with less shades of grey.
This film also has a coda where Bruce had started growing yet another Ellie who hatches as the film ends and – spoiler – has the real Ellie’s consciousness, which makes the proceedings of the film more tragic than anything, as nothing that came before really matters and Bruce’s conflicted torment is for naught since he’s now passed. This isn’t to knock writer/director BT Meza, who gets good performances throughout and the film is shot well. But uktimately, it’s Rothe who makes the experience bearable and keeps you engaged throughout. You’re invested in her various characters when you really shouldnt be as much, even zombie Ellie is affecting and you want good things for Ultimate Ellie at the end and even Ellie but not as she flees with Alice at the end. It’s still worth a watch, especially if you like human dramas and slow burn sci fi.
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VIDEO REVIEW