There’s the strange stuff that happens at Plantworks, for instance, like the friendly dog who inadvertently spends the night in the flower lab and emerges unfriendly. Around that time, Alice’s colleague, Chris ( Ben Whishaw ), expresses romantic feelings for Alice, but then becomes more concerned with the well-being of Little Joe. Later, Alice faces accusations of ignoring virus protocols in developing the plant, but before she can even get defensive about it, the issue is shrugged off. Hmm.

The movie’s story line, concocted by Hausner and Géraldine Bajard , recalls that of the much-remade classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” in which emotional humans are replaced by unfeeling drones hatched from pods.

The droll joke of “Little Joe” is that it frequently looks and feel like a “Snatchers” reboot as directed by a pod person. The tone is locked in with Alice’s own coolness. Hausner frequently frames shots with Kubrick-evoking one-point perspective. She uses lenses that make the distances between two people sitting in an ordinary-size room look enormous. The deliberateness of the styling makes the story’s predictability feel more like inexorability. The events may be familiar, but their stagings are unusual and often uncanny.

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov once mocked professors, and, by extension, other critical types, who approached art works with the question: “What is the guy trying to say?” “Little Joe” frequently invites the question for the deliberate purpose of resisting any answers. Is the movie a satire on Western society’s arguable overreliance on psychotropic drugs? Maybe. But the film also suggests a potentially metaphysical dimension. “Who can prove the genuineness of our feelings? Moreover, who cares?” one character asks when disputing the idea that Little Joe’s control over its owners is something to be frightened of.

When such concerns of authenticity are put aside, what is our ideation of humanity left with? That’s a scary thought.

Little Joe

Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes.