I Origins is a 2014 American science fiction romantic drama film written and directed by Mike Cahill. The independent production premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival on , 2014. It is distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, and opened in limited release on , 2014. It won the Best Feature Length Film Award at the Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic de Catalunya on October 11, 2014.
Plot
A Ph.D. student, Ian Gray, is researching the evolution of the eye with research partner, Kenny, and first-year lab assistant, Karen. At a Halloween party Gray encounters Sofi, a young woman masked with only hazel-speckled, ash-blue eyes visible. She later leads him into the washroom to have sex before abruptly leaving.
Mysterious synchronicities, like the recurring number 11, guide Gray to a billboard on which he recognizes Sofi's eyes. Eventually he sees her on a train. They begin a relationship being deeply in love, despite Ian's hard rationalism in sharp contrast with Sofi's fey spirituality. Ian tells Sofi that he has always been in love with her, saying that before the Big Bang his atoms were once with hers, and that his atoms have always loved her atoms. One day they spontaneously agree to marry but must wait a day for a license. Disappointed, they walk out of the registry office. Ian gets a call from Karen who says she has found a blind worm—Eisenia fetida—with the DNA necessary to develop an eye. An ecstatic Ian takes Sofi to the lab with him.
Karen leaves while Sofi is upset by the research they are doing, saying he is playing God. Ian accidentally splashes his eyes with formaldehyde and asks Sofi to call Karen, who administers first aid. Sofi takes Ian home but on the way up, the elevator gets stuck between floors. Ian removes his eye bandages to be able to pull himself onto the next floor, but Sofi is scared and hesitates. When Ian finally convinces her to be pulled up, the elevator abruptly begins moving and Ian is terrified when he realizes her lower half has been chopped off. Ian goes into a depression and avoids work and his friends but Karen is finally able to get him to agree to meet her, when they end up kissing.
The film flashes forward seven years. Ian has written an eye evolution book and is now married to a pregnant Karen. Ian still has feelings for Sofi that are combined with the guilt he feels for her death. Karen catches him masturbating at what she thought was Pornography but she realizes he was actually looking at old videos of Sofi. They start to discuss the circumstances surrounding her death, in which Karen suggests Sofi would still be alive and together with Ian if she hadn't called him to the lab that day, but Ian admits his final thought before the elevator accident was regretting being stuck with the childish Sofi for the rest of his life. The both of them kiss and accept they both have their own guilt to live with.
When their baby is born, the hospital takes an iris scan of baby Tobias' eyes. The results are entered in the database and the program identifies the baby as a certain Paul Edgar Dairy. The nurse re-enters the results, thinking it is a glitch, and the problem disappears. A few months later, a Dr. Simmons calls, recommending further testing the baby because she says he may be showing signs of autism. The test involves seemingly random photographs, but Ian and Karen become suspicious. He tracks the pictures from the test to Idaho and the family of Paul Edgar Dairy, who had died just before their baby was conceived.
Kenny is now creator of the iris scan database used to store Tobias' scan, and Kenny reveals that Dr. Simmons is in fact one of only five people with full access to the database. As a test, he helps Ian and Karen run some photos of deceased family members, plus various other people's eyes through the database to see if there are any other recent matches. They get a hit for Sofi, whose iris scan matches one made in India just three months prior, years after Sofi's death.
