Teknolust

"Teknolust" wants to be a spooky, futuristic comedy about eros in the age of cyberculture — a love story for Wired subscribers. Which might work if the writing, direction, and much of the acting weren't from the lower rungs of indie-film ineptness.

Tilda Swinton is easily the best thing here, and since she plays four different roles, in four different wigs, there's a lot of her to go around. Her key role is Dr. Rosetta Stone (frizzy dark curls), a frumpy, romantically maladroit scientist who has secretly created three oversexed clone "viruses" of herself: Ruby (motherly, with black hair), Olive (sweet and dim, with blond hair), and Marinne (persnickety, with red hair).

Rosetta's "children" run an Internet sex site from their apartment and send Ruby out on nighttime singles-bar forays to find the genetic material they need to survive. When Ruby's male conquests start developing rashes in the shape of bar codes on their foreheads, the feds are called.

Sounds like an ambitious evening of shock cinema, no? In the hands of a David Cronenberg maybe, but as written and directed by Lynn Hershman-Leeson, "Teknolust" stumbles from one catatonic scene to the next, mixing aggressively "clever" ideas with strident dialogue.

Jeremy Davies mopes about as a misfit copy-shop employee who falls for Ruby (she's a copy too, get it?), and James Urbaniak is reduced to stick-figure monosyllables as the federal agent investigating the "biogender virus." As a private eye, Karen Black seems to have no idea why she's here, which makes two of us.

Only Swinton appears to be having any fun, and for an actress this dour and tightly wound, that's something. In the end, though, Rosetta and her creations are mere position papers to be moved around in the director's overly schematic vision of desire and technology.

"Teknolust" has a welcome humor but only in theory, and theory, chilly and self-involved, is where this filmmaker seems most at home. Like its bio-digital sirens, the movie never quite comes alive.

"Teknolust" is rated R for scenes of simulated sex and other sexual contact, crude sex talk and use of strong sexual profanity and brief female nudity. Running time: 82 minutes.