Directed by Alexander Payne
Starring Matt Damon, Christoph Waltz, Hong Chau, Kristen Wiig

In the near future, amiable suburban schlub Paul Safranek (Matt Damon) and his wife, Audrey (Kristen Wiig) decide to undergo "downsizing", a scientific process that will irreversibly shrink them down to five inches in height. The process was developed as an ecological solution - tiny people have a tiny carbon footprint and so on - but the more compelling reasons are financial: taking in scaled down space and resource requirements, little people with a little savings are comparative millionaires. Struggling to deal with their debts, the Safraneks bite the bullet.

Or, at least, Paul does. Audrey backs out at the last minute, leaving Paul shrunk, destitute (presumably she slugged him hard in the divorce) and working a call centre job to make ends meet in Leisureland,  a planned community for the small. And that's when things get interesting.

Director Alexander Payne (Sideways, Election) and his frequent writing partner, Jim Taylor are less interested in the logistical implications of their little sci-fi riff, preferring to use it as a device to look at the systemic issues that give rise to inequality and need. In a world where, after shrinking, $50k is equivalent to $12m, why is there still poverty? Capitalism, my dudes. Downsizing is a stop-gap measure designed to let the party go on longer, but it doesn't solve anything in the long run - not when we take the same old bullshit with us into our brave, small, new world.

The film explores this through Paul's interaction with two key characters: gleefully hedonistic Serbian entrepreneur Dusan Mirkovic (Christoph Waltz), who spends his time between wheeling and dealing in a kind of rolling Eurotrash Masque of the Red Death party with his wingman, Udo Kier (always a welcome sight); and Ngoc Lan Tran (Hong Chau) a one-legged Vietnamese dissident shrunk against her will and mailed to the US by her government. Ngoc now works as a cleaner in the small folk community, scrubbing the houses of the tiny and wealthy because, holy hell, even in a manufactured paradise, there has to be an underclass.

Downsizing is a gentle film that kind of meanders along, right up until you realise that it's really a rather savage indictment of late capitalism buried inside a pastel-shaded "normie guy learns to love again" narrative. While it's very nice that Paul learns that the true value in life is in giving (he becomes a kind of street doctor, handyman and go-to helper at Ngoc's rundown tenement, a makeshift building thrown together outside Leisureland's climate-controlled, green-lawned paradise), Payne and Taylor are asking us to consider why such altruism should be needed at all: this is a system that could literally elevate everyone, but chooses not to. It's not heaven if you have to scrub your own toilet, and so we must condemn some to hell in order to maintain our idyll. Cui bono? Wealthy suburbanites who choose not to see.

Downsizing has struggled with critics and audiences, but is well worth taking a run at, and hopefully it'll find some appreciation down the track. It's a little film with a lot to say, and it's a damn shame people don't seem to want to listen right now.

TRAVIS JOHNSON