Astronomical B-movie

A well-crafted space horror borrows shamelessly from past missions.

Despite its stellar cast and setting, Life is a B-movie. It’s a horror flick pruned at the edges and reduced to a basic, elemental premise: in the near future, a research crew aboard the International

Space Station retrieve some Martian soil and reanimate a single-celled bacterium within, which is nicknamed “Calvin”. But Calvin quickly starts expanding into an extra-terrestrial monstrosity who doesn’t come in peace and doesn’t even bother to sample the rehydrated macaroni.

As with most B-movies, the pirating is shameless. Espinosa barely bothers to hide Life’s influences, a roster of intergalactic classics, including a redux of the keening, eerie choral chords of Lux Aeterna from 2001: A Space Odyssey, the carbon-dioxide shivers of Apollo 13, the contemporary dazzle of Gravity, and, of course, Alien. In space, everyone can see you pilfer.

We ought to forgive Life its lack of originality because, for the most part, the picture is fantastically well crafted. It begins with a gorgeous shot of a luminous Sun cresting the Earth’s curvature and silhouetting the black and ominous space

station, before venturing inside for a seven-minute single-take look around, chasing the crew as they float swiftly, like hung ballerinas, through tubes of blinking warning lights. It’s entrancing, and an efficient introduction for the characters, played by, among others, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Unlike Alien, however, the movie doesn’t derive its peril from sustained silences, but from frenetic chaos,

accompanied by foghorn blares and scratched strings. After a chastening 90 minutes, the ISS is a can of crushed limbs, misplaced internal organs and blood.

Pure terror in tight places is common in horror movies, but it’s rare to see the essence of claustrophobia captured so viscerally. At the very least, Life finds new and elaborate ways of doing death.

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of criss-crossing staircases and glimpses through internal windows, is an early demonstration of the director’s awesome formal control.

A fellow actor offers the homeless couple the use of a tired rooftop flat, in which the previous tenant has left her belongings cluttering one room. When Rana, alone in the flat, is assaulted, neither she nor the audience sees the perpetrator, but Emad sets out to track him down.

It sounds like a simple thriller, part horror movie, part revenge tragedy, but Farhadi, whose screenplay scatters oblique and tantalising hints, creates a moral landscape of complicated topography: quickly, we realise that he is more upset about the assault than she is; slowly, we become aware that a growing gulf between husband and wife is not new; and as his investigations lead him into the city’s minority Azerbaijani community, even non-Iranian viewers will sense the ethnic and class tension that’s been thrown into the mix.

As a story of crime and punishment, it offers no easy answers, much less cheap catharsis. Whodunnit, in short, is less important than what it has cost, and what will happen next. More than most, Farhadi is alive to the myriad complexities of everyday experience.

Meanwhile, his patient storytelling is assisted by wonderfully understated performances, in particular those of Hosseini and Alidoosti (both Farhadi veterans: she played the title role in About Elly). The result is a film in which righteousness meets anxiety, with a finale that will have you closer to the edge of your seat than any shoot-out ever could.

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