The inexplicable horrors of Life

This horror movie makes no sense. It's still really scary.

Life.
(Image credit: 2016 CTMG, Inc)

If Jurassic Park made it a point to aggressively flag science's worst tendencies, with Jeff Goldblum's Dr. Ian Malcolm offering depressive explanations of what's going wrong and what it means philosophically, Life is its opposite: This is horror stripped down to its most visceral and least theoretical core. The theater I saw it in was packed with people writhing in their seats.

The sci-fi thriller about a Martian life form brought aboard by six astronauts manning the International Space Station — directed by Daniel Espinosa of Easy Money and Safe House, and co-written by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, who wrote Deadpool and Zombieland — is standard fare for the genre except for one thing: It's eerily short on exposition. No one quite knows what's going on, how it's working, or how things are changing. That's partly because "Calvin," the alien organism made up of cells that remain biologically unspecialized ("all-muscle, all-brain, all-eye"), targets the specialist first. By partly incapacitating the one character — Ariyon Bakare's Dr. Hugh Derry — who could have shed some light on his developing abilities, he limits the strategies available to everyone else, and the information available to the audience.

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Lili Loofbourow

Lili Loofbourow is the culture critic at TheWeek.com. She's also a special correspondent for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an editor for Beyond Criticism, a Bloomsbury Academic series dedicated to formally experimental criticism. Her writing has appeared in a variety of venues including The Guardian, Salon, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, and Slate.