What constitutes horror is simply a matter of directorial choice. If the director of a televised football game had cameras and mikes on the field and pushed them up close to injured athletes, an ordinary sporting event would be transformed into a horror film. Surgery is heroic, but the Surgery Channel would be, for many people, unbearable. (That’s the secret of “The Knick.”) Classic movies, under the strictures of the Hays Code, avoided gore and depicted bloodless shootings in which the sound of gunshots was coupled with actors falling to the stage. This limitation led to a focus on the moral horror of shootings and avoided the visceral revulsion of bloodshed—and, frankly, isn’t that sufficient? (It was sufficient, for instance, in “Chi-Raq,” one of the many virtues of Spike Lee’s 2015 masterwork.)
The new science-fiction film “Life,” directed by Daniel Espinosa, is also a horror film. It’s the “Snakes on a Plane” of sci-fi: a movie that hinges on a single idea—if there’s life on Mars, it may not be friendly. Indeed, it may prey upon humans in a way that changes, in a deeply rooted psychological way, our relationship to our bodies, our sense of self, our existence. That kind of resonant insight is rooted in reality and reflected in movies: Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island,” for instance, conveys not the political crisis nor even the fear of death arising from the nuclear-arms race of the postwar years but the existential dread, the sense of a changed relationship to the very notion of life and death, that seeped into the mental fibre of anyone who lived through it—including Scorsese, in childhood.
Espinosa’s film is best during its isolated moments of shock, when it delivers on the promise of the premise: six astronauts aboard the International Space Station have recovered a small soil sample from a damaged Mars probe. In a bio-quarantined laboratory, the chief biologist, Hugh Derry (Ariyon Bakare), examines the sample, discovers microscopic but inert bodies that resemble cells, and attempts to stimulate them. (“This is some ‘Re-Animator’ shit,” another astronaut responds; jokes follow. The script was written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, of “Deadpool,” and it’s got the patter to prove it.) Stimulate them he does: the cells begin to move, then they reproduce into a sort of silicone-like starfish form that moves with a petal-like grace.
What’s distinctive about the cells, Hugh says, is that they’re undifferentiated—each is muscle, brain, and sensory organs all in one. When the starfish-like thing, called Calvin, grows to the size of a hand, Hugh stimulates it again, gently, this time with electricity—to which it responds by grabbing his gloved hand with its tentacles and, with industrial strength, crushing it, breaking his bones and tearing through his glove. The pilot, Rory (Ryan Reynolds), saves Hugh but gets trapped with Calvin in the isolated chamber, and it attacks him in a singularly macabre way—it slips a tentacle into his mouth, then slides itself all the way down his gullet. (It’s as if Calvin represented the revenge of the “Oldboy” octopus, the nightmare form of the “Arrival” squid.) Not only does Espinosa make Rory’s convulsive death repulsively terrifying, he uses the weightless environment to show the blood and gore floating around his corpse. As for Calvin, it emerges from Rory newly sustained, and the five remaining astronauts realize what’s happening: Calvin simply needs to eat, and they’re the only organic matter around.
Calvin makes no noise; its “body” is a translucent, iridescent white, containing a hint of red filaments. It moves as fast as a bat, leaping strongly, as if flying, and flopping firmly from surface to surface. Nearly formless, it can slip like a mouse through a tiny crack. Calvin escapes the bio-quarantine and, in effect, takes over the spacecraft. As it grows in size, it becomes increasingly voracious, and the plot morphs into a science-fiction version of “And Then There Were None.”
One of the mysteries of Calvin is that it is an entirely unknown quantity—it isn’t clear what Calvin craves (are there foods other than humans that it would prefer?) or what can kill Calvin (if it’s shredded or sliced up, will the pieces survive on their own?). Can it endure extreme heat or extreme cold? Can it drown? (A science-fiction movie is like a board game that discloses its rules in the playing.) And, as the surviving astronauts recognize that Calvin isn’t easily disposed of, they also realize that their principal mission has changed—it’s no longer a matter of their own survival or that of the International Space Station. Rather, they must make sure that Calvin never reaches Earth, and so they must insure that the station, and they themselves, never return to Earth. In effect, they have to sacrifice themselves in order to save humankind.
Unfortunately, Calvin’s monstrosity is revealed early enough in the action that it becomes a tough act to top, and Espinosa shrinks from the unmitigated bodily horror that, say, David Cronenberg might have brought to the project (along with a rating that should come with its own beta-blockers). The movie reduces its fear factor to simple suspense that’s not insignificant but is pretty insubstantial. “Life” is a nineteen-fifties low-budget sci-fi quickie that has its budget ramped up by the presence of a few stars—Reynolds, Rebecca Ferguson, and Jake Gyllenhaal—alongside the less familiar but amply skilled trio of Bakare, Olga Dihovichnaya, and Hiroyuki Sanada. (Bakare’s performance had an admirably radiant ease; it should propel him into some choice leading roles.) Its budget is also, and perhaps especially, boosted by one variety of effect that is the movie’s most sustained pleasure—motion through a weightless environment.
Espinosa’s sense of drama is efficient, familiar, and narrow; if there’s a moral sentiment to his direction, it’s precisely in the limits that he imposes on the movie’s dose of pain and gore. (Cronenberg’s power as a director is his quasi-confessional delight in the depiction of quease-making horrors.) What Espinosa conspicuously enjoys is the sheer kinetic realm. His realization of astronauts floating through the spacecraft, gliding through their artificial atmosphere as if swimming in air, has a simple and giddy delight, which he reinforces with a few long camera moves that sail through the craft along with the astronauts. (He also lends the notion a particular poignancy—Hugh is paraplegic, who moves in the weightless environment with an ease denied him on Earth.)
The movie’s subject, of course, is the potential for menace in nature, the threats potentially unleashed by constructive scientific research. The astronauts and the spectators on Earth, who are glued to their screens watching the apparently successful retrieval mission, celebrate the discovery of the first sign of life in outer space. The response of people back home to the ensuing catastrophe on the space station is never shown, however. The response of scientists on Earth to the discovery of the cell-like particles discovered in the Mars dust is never heard, either.
The blandly but frantically cautionary tale about the dangers of the quest for knowledge depends mainly on a suppression of context—on a lack of discourse, a script that builds its terror not on that quest for knowledge but on the artificial sealing off of the notion that anything is known at all. Instead of talking with scientists on Earth about what’s to be done with the samples, the movie sticks to a story that involves astronauts following “protocols.” In effect, “Life” envisions a space mission to be like a generic movie itself, one that results from a methodical and rigorous conformity to the script. The aesthetic of “Life” is one with its simplistic message; as ever, cinematic form is inseparable from a movie’s substance.
