CINEMA the @ brewhouse
The 9th Life of Louis Drax Directed by Alexandre Aja
Tuesday 22 November @ 7.30pm Running time 1 hr 48 mins Starring: Jamie Dornan, Aiden Longworth, Sarah Gadon, Aaron Paul
“A mystery beyond reality”
15
The story begins on Louis Drax’s 9th birthday, when a lifetime of curious mishaps culminates in the boy’s near-fatal fall. Desperate to reveal the strange circumstances behind the young boy’s accident and dark coincidences that have plagued his entire life, Dr. Allan Pascal (Dornan) is drawn into a thrilling mystery that explores the nature of the sixth sense, testing the boundaries of fantasy and reality. Extract from Philip Kemp’s review in Sight & Sound: So far, the output of French-born director Alexandre Aja has circle around the horror genre but has yet to score a bullseye. His second feature, the slasher movie Haute tension (2003) showed promise as did Mirrors (2008). Two remakes, The Hills Have Eyes (2006) and Pira-nha 3D (2010) fell some way short of the originals. Aja’s latest, The 9th Life of Louis Drax, is his most accomplished to date. The film’s prime strength lies in its central character - even though for most of its running time he’s in a coma. Right from the start, nine-year-old Louis Drax (Aiden Longworth) introduces himself in voiceover as
“the amazing accident-prone boy”, while we see a quick, near-comic run-through of the disasters that have put paid to his first eight lives - electrocution, food poisoning, a falling chandelier, etc. (We get a reprise of some of these, from a crucially different perspective, towards the end of the film.) Then comes the fatal ninth-birthday picnic with his estranged parents at Lands End (the San Fran-cisco park, not Cornwall), after which he dies for two hours, then revives into a coma. But his voiceover continues, not only telling us about his past but commenting on events occurring while he’s unconscious - and even, it seems, sometimes controlling them. For all that Louis is appealingly sweet-faced and a