Movie Review: CLOCK

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: May 13th, 2023 / 04:06 PM

Rating: TV-MA
Stars: Dianna Agron, Melora Hardin, Jay Ali, Saul Rubinek, Grace Porter
Writer: Alexis Lucknow
Director: Alexis Lucknow
Distributor: Hulu
Release Date: April 28, 2023

The title of CLOCK refers to the biological one that everyone is widely believed to possess. Except, contrary to this assumption, not everyone does in fact have a biological clock – that is, the desire to have children.

The conflict between the belief and the reality are what give CLOCK its premise. Ella Patel (Dianna Agron) is a star interior designer, happily married to surgeon Aidan (Jay Ali), with a full life that she enjoys.

But all of Ella’s friends either have children or are about to have children, and keep insisting that deep down, Ella really wants children, too. More emphatically, Ella’s father (Saul Rubinek), the son of Holocaust survivors, works into every conversation and visit how heartbroken he is that Ella refuses to carry on the family line.

So, when Ella visits a gynecologist who tells her that the lack of desire to reproduce is now seen as a fertility issue, and that at almost thirty-eight, Ella is considered geriatric in terms of child-bearing, she’s ready to consider a new treatment.

Without telling Aidan, Ella bails on what she describes as her dream job to be a volunteer test subject for ten days at a clinic run by Dr. Elizabeth Simmons (Melora Hardin).

Simmons is absolutely certain that her combination of medication, talk therapy and an implant will make any woman desire to conceive, bear, and rear a child. She’s a lot less interested in the side effects.

It’s no huge leap to see the horrors of CLOCK as an analogy for conversion therapy (the discredited practice of trying to make lesbians and gay men become heterosexual), but it also works as is.

Director/writer Alexis Lucknow comes up with some great metaphors for what can happen when people are forced to try to feel and do things that do not come naturally or necessarily to them. There are some disturbing, inventive visuals, as well as sequences that have emotional resonance.

Agron gives a fearless performance, able to be self-assured, meek, subdued or enraged beyond measure as the situation demands. Hardin gives us the epitome of someone who sees herself as a caring professional, able to convince herself and others of what she believes. Ali is sweet, and Rubinek is poignant as Ella’s adoring but demanding father.

Where CLOCK skips a tick or two is in giving us a full portrait of Ella. This is a movie that might have benefited from a few minutes of additional running time. Despite Agron’s excellent portrayal, we feel we ought to know more about her in order to have a better sense of what is a result of the treatment and what is innate.

Still, CLOCK covers subject matter that is seldom raised in film, and almost never in this manner. It is a singular and worthy endeavor.

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