Life review: Rebecca Ferguson, Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynolds play an enjoyably gory game of hide-and-seek with a hungry alien!

★★★★☆

The crew of a space station is picked off, one by one, by an extraterrestrial life form which seems to view the human contents on the craft as some kind of alien finger buffet. And if that premise sounds more than a little familiar, that’s because Daniel Espinosa’s nail-biting sci-fi horror movie shares narrative DNA with everything from Tarkovsky’s Solaris to Danny Boyle’s Sunshine to, most obvious of all, Ridley Scott’s Alien.

But although this is undeniably an Alien rip-off, it’s an Alien rip-off that announces itself with a dizzyingly audacious zero-gravity single-shot sequence in which Ryan Reynolds wrests a wounded satellite out of orbit using a robotic grabber claw. With this stunning set piece, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey more than meets the challenge set by Emmanuel Lubezki’s Oscar-winning work on Gravity.

The satellite of which contains Martian soil samples, within which is an inert single-celled organism: incontrovertible proof of life on Mars. In the name of scientific research (or of narrative convenience) the head researcher (British actor Ariyon Bakare) decides to jump-start the organism out of its stasis, and is rewarded by a rapidly growing blob of gelatinous malice. Alien’s infamous John Hurt chest-eruption scene is matched for gruesome relish if not shock value by a sequence in which the creature force-feeds itself in the most cringeworthy fashion to a key character that you really wouldn't see coming.

The film isn't so long and within ten minutes (hence why the short review) in just jumps straight to the point of the alien growing and eradicating the crew, so not all of the actors really have enough screen time to register, but Jake Gyllenhaal, playing a jaded medic who no longer feels he belongs on Earth, has a brooding, soulful quality; the electricity between his character and Rebecca Ferguson’s safety officer crackles satisfyingly.

There are some pacing issues: the obligatory despairing “all is lost” sequence at the end of the second act drags a little, and is not improved by one of the remaining survivors quoting chunks of the insipid children’s bedtime book Goodnight Moon. And the slightly predictable nature of the plotting doesn’t match the inventiveness of the exuberantly grisly special effects. But the screenplay’s policy of exploring every possible worst-case scenario culminates in a deliciously bleak, if not entirely unexpected payoff. The first hour of the film was truly edge of your seat stuff, full of amazing imagery and the tiniest most creepiest deadly alien that had me quaking in my boots but then on the other hand it definitely could of been better and felt a little rushed at times. overall I recommend you watch this movie.