The 9th Life of Louis Drax – Film Review

Directed by Alexandre Aja
Starring Jamie Dornan, Sarah Gadon, Aaron Paul, Aiden Longworth

French director Alexandre Aja first came to international prominence with the brilliantly assembled 2003 slasher film Haute Tension (inexplicably retitled Switchblade Romance on these shores).  Since then, he has struggled to find projects suited to his undeniable, but undeniably narrow, talents.  Lately, he has moved away from straightforward horror, most recently with 2013’s Horns, a bewilderingly botched Daniel Radcliff vehicle that attempted to cross Twilight-style youth romance with watered-down Guillermo Del Toro aesthetics.  Aja’s latest attempt at diversification, the speculative-fiction medical mystery The 9th Life of Louis Drax is a step up from Horns, but continues to find the director floundering.

The film is adapted from a novel by Liz Jensen.  The title character (Aiden Longworth) is a young boy who lies in a coma, having fallen (or been pushed?) from a cliff during a picnic with his pristine mother (Sarah Gadon) and more rough-hewn stepfather (Aaron Paul).  In hospital, he is ministered to by coma specialist Dr. Pascal (Jamie Dornan), who discovers a possible way to make contact with the shut-in child.  Meanwhile, a police detective (Molly Parker) hovers on the periphery.  Jensen’s book seems ripe for film adaptation, as its intriguing ideas and images might theoretically flourish free from its author’s banal prose and clueless attempts to affect the interior monologue of its young subject.  Unfortunately, Max Minghella’s script elects to reproduce this monologue almost verbatim as voice-over.

Aja has a polished visual style, and makes the most of the story’s opportunities to indulge his sweet-tooth for the grotesque.  The governing influence seems to be Jean-Pierre Jeunet – with the tone landing somewhere between the capricious, quick-cut fantasy of Amelie (2001) and the antiseptic nastiness of the opening scenes of Alien Resurrection (2007).  At the same time, this is a more reality-bound story than anything Jeunet has approached – even in the numerous dream sequences, which serve primarily to inch along a mystery plot whose resolution will be apparent to most from the opening scenes.

Since the direction lacks a definite identity, it falls to the performances to pull the film together.  Sarah Gadon is a good actress well cast, and she makes the most of a part which requires her to play a number of different archetypes without ever quite coalescing into a character.  Dornan, predictably, is a washout.  Once again, his memorable turn as an implacable automaton in The Fall looks less like acting and more like lucky casting.  This is not a demanding role – involving as it does a lot of listening and sitting still – but Dornan plays it like a deer in headlights.   His “brilliant doctor” turn involves a lot of intense, “commanding” looks presumably left over from his underwear modelling days, and a vertiginously wavering accent that provides the most suspenseful moments in the film.  Will he make it to the end of a line without whisking us back from New England to Belfast?  Usually not.

Longworth is also a trial, giving one of those irritatingly over-enunciated child performances nobody finds “cute” outside of Hollywood films.  Paul is fine in a McGuffin role, and the ever-reliable Parker makes the most of what she has to do.  There are alluring ideas at work in the visual effects, although the end results occasionally look unfinished.