The Eyelash Always Testifies

In July 2025 the British government published a health plan with a sentence in it that Andrew Niccol could have written. The NHS, it said, would "implement universal newborn genomic testing and population-based polygenic risk scoring." It sat in a bullet list between lung cancer screening and HPV jabs, with no fanfare. Nobody in Whitehall mentioned Gattaca. They didn't need to. Everyone who read the line already had the film in their head: the blood drop on the delivery-room table, the readout, the doctor reciting a dead man's future to a mother holding a baby that is a few seconds old.

That's the strange afterlife of Niccol's first film as a director. It flopped in October 1997, taking about $12.5 million in the US against a reported $36 million budget. It then became the reference point for every argument about human genetics for the next thirty years. Bioethicists cite it in papers. In 1997 the molecular biologist Lee Silver told readers of Nature Genetics that it was a film all geneticists should see, if only to understand how the public saw their trade. It's a film everybody has an opinion about, and fewer people have rewatched.

Rewatched, it holds up as a thing to look at, and it creaks as a thing to listen to.

The art: a beautiful machine with a murder in it

Start with how it looks, because that's where Gattaca is unbeatable. Niccol and his production team set the future in the past. The Gattaca Aerospace Corporation is Frank Lloyd Wright's Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, a long, low spaceship of a building that was already decades old when they filmed there. The cars are electric, styled on 1960s Rovers, Citroëns and Studebakers, and they hum instead of roaring. Everyone wears good tailoring. The palette is aquarium green and gold. The whole film was nominated for an Oscar for its art direction, and it earns it in every frame. It's a future designed by people who suspected that, once perfection was on offer, the rich would buy the old-fashioned version of everything else.

Michael Nyman's score swells and swoons in the same register. The opening titles, by Michael Riley, are close-ups of fingernails and hairs hitting the floor like falling meteors, oversized models dropped with a thud. You only learn later that they're the skin Vincent scrubs off every morning so the building won't know he's there. It's one of the great title sequences of the decade, and it tells you the film's real subject before a word is spoken. In this world you shed your evidence constantly. Your body informs on you.

Ethan Hawke plays Vincent Freeman, conceived the old way and labelled an "In-Valid" at birth, with a heart defect and a predicted lifespan of 30.2 years. He wants to fly to Titan. The only route is to become a "borrowed ladder", renting the identity of Jerome Eugene Morrow, a genetically engineered swimmer who won silver instead of gold and then threw himself in front of a car. Jude Law plays Jerome, and Law walks off with the film from a wheelchair. Jerome is bitter, funny, drunk and dressed beautifully, a man designed for first place who can't forgive himself for second. Every scene between the two of them is about envy running in both directions. Vincent wants Jerome's body. Jerome wants Vincent's nerve.

Then there's the plot, and the plot is the problem. A mission director is murdered, one of Vincent's eyelashes turns up near the body, and the film becomes a slow police procedural with Alan Arkin and Loren Dean hunting an unregistered In-Valid through a building of pristine valids. It's there to generate tension, and it generates very little, because we know Vincent didn't do it and the real killer is revealed with a shrug. Uma Thurman, as the colleague Irene, is given a heart condition, a lot of meaningful glances and not much else. She is less a character than a mirror held up so Vincent can see how a "valid" with a flaw lives.

What works is the swimming. Twice Vincent races his engineered brother Anton out to sea, and the second time he tells him the secret. "I never saved anything for the swim back." It's the best line Niccol has written, and it's the whole film: a man who can only beat the odds by refusing to budget for survival. The coda, with Jerome climbing into the incinerator wearing his silver medal as the rocket lifts, is overwrought and still lands like a punch.

The prophecy: the right machine, the wrong gatekeeper

Gattaca bet that we'd learn to read embryos, read people from the cells they shed, and sort them by the result. On the technology it was almost exactly right.

Polygenic embryo screening is a product. Companies such as Orchid sell whole-genome tests on IVF embryos with risk scores for "complex conditions like heart disease, breast cancer, diabetes, and schizophrenia." By December 2021 the European Society of Human Genetics was warning that at least one child had already been born after this kind of selection, and calling the practice "unproven" and "unethical", because a polygenic score on an embryo predicts very little. The scan in the delivery room, meanwhile, is becoming national policy. Genomics England's Generation Study is sequencing the genomes of 100,000 newborns, and the 2025 plan treats it as the pilot for doing every baby. Shedding is policing, too. US border agents piloted Rapid DNA kits in 2019 that could settle whether a child was related to an adult in about 90 minutes without human review. The eyelash in the corridor is a reasonable guess at where that goes.

But Niccol aimed his anger at the wrong door. In Gattaca the discrimination is done by employers, quietly, with a urine sample at the turnstile. "We now have discrimination down to a science," Vincent says in voiceover. That's the part that didn't happen. The US passed the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act in 2008, making it illegal for employers to use genetic information in hiring. Britain's insurers have agreed not to ask for predictive genetic test results, except for Huntington's disease on life cover over £500,000. The hiring office got a law before it got the technology.

What the film missed is that the sorting didn't need a corporation. It was always going to be done by parents, at the embryo stage, privately, for a fee, with the best of intentions and a consent form. In the mid-2020s the genetic gatekeeper wasn't Gattaca Aerospace. It was a couple at a fertility clinic choosing between five blastocysts on a spreadsheet. Nobody was discriminated against. Some people were just never born. That's a harder villain to put on screen, because there's nobody to fool with a borrowed ladder.

The reading

Gattaca is a beautiful film with a thin thriller bolted on, and a prophecy that got the instruments right and the orchestra wrong. Watch it for Law, for the swimming, for the building and for the fingernails falling like meteors. Then read the 2025 health plan and notice which line made you flinch. The film taught a generation what to be afraid of. The future it warned about arrived anyway. It just came in through the maternity ward instead of the staff entrance.