TIFF Review: Chrysalis

There's a short scene about halfway through Chrysalis that's so beautifully staged it nearly lifts the whole movie up a few notches from its natural place as marvelously-crafted, but ultimately middle-rung sci-fi/action. In that scene, we get to see a doctor of the not-too-distant-future assisting in the operation of a patient who isn't physically there, through the use of a virtual reality matrix that recreates both the body being operated on and the tools for the operating. Up until that scene, we've known that we're in a not-too-distant-future that has some plausible advancements in technology, including some scary ray-guns, but the film has wisely restrained itself from giving us flashy details just for the sake of showing off its future-world, so when the operating scene hits it somehow comes across as both believable and wondrous. There are other stand-out moments as well that must be mentioned, including several punishing fight scenes that come courtesy of fight choreographer Alain Figlarz, of The Bourne Identity, and a complicated nighttime shot near the end that's so well-produced it leaps out at you.

Hoffman's quest to track down and destroy the human-trafficker villain Nicolov is shadowed by a parallel story that's weirder and harder to grasp at first, but becomes more obvious as it goes along. We follow a girl who has barely survived a devastating car wreck, but is fortunate (or is she?) to have a mother who is some kind of black-market super-surgeon, operating her own posh clinic that seems built out of one of those giant steel refrigerators, where she engages in apparently controversial, off-the-books procedures. You can probably already formulate an idea of how these two threads will run together, and you'd probably be right -- despite some misdirection and unpredictable sidebars, the film is ultimately leading down a path that we've tread many times before. Sure, it takes us there in some fresh and visually creative ways, but still. It occurred to me while I was watching the film that there was even an old episode of The Twilight Zone that covered the same ground this film covered -- aren't there any new ideas to play around with?

On the other hand -- see how much I struggled with this one? -- the cast is uniformly excellent, and had me wondering: why is it that French actors are viewed as such foreign entities by American audiences, while most of our biggest stars are British? If we could embrace more French up and comers, our national cinema stock would certainly go up a few points. Especially good in this film are Marthe Keller as the creepy mother/doctor who seems to have taken advantage of some futuristic botox, although I may be reading into a detail that the filmmakers didn't anticipate, and Melanie Thierry as the little girl who is facing some kind of post-surgical difficulty that she can't put a finger on, but knows it's there. The great Patrick Bauchau also shows up in the film, but he's criminally underused. How could you cast Bauchau in a sci-fi film and then give him only a minor supporting role? It looks like my thumb is now turning down again. Chrysalis is good action, not-so-good sci-fi, but overall a good piece of action/sci-fi.

A public TIFF screening of Chrysalis will be held Friday, September 14th at 9:30pm.