Daniel Espinosa, 110 mins, starring: Ryan Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson

Daniel Espinosa’s new feature provides incontrovertible proof that, well over three decades after that polyp-like succubus exploded out of John Hurt’s stomach in Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), the sci-fi horror film is alive and well. This is superior genre fare. It borrows not only from Scott’s movie but from 2001: A Space Odyssey, Gravity, and countless other films too.

To call it derivative is to miss the point. Its premise may be familiar but there is plenty of energy and ingenuity in the way the filmmakers tackle their material. Espinosa realises that the most spectacular special effects will mean nothing unless the film has the human factor – and the audience feels a strong connection with the characters. The most disturbing shots here are the close-ups of the crew members’ faces as they realise the predicament they’ve landed in.

The build-up is on the leisurely side. Six crew members are aboard the International Space Station. They all have different skill sets and they come from different countries. In the early scenes, they’re very pleased with themselves. They’ve just captured a “Mars sample”, a tiny little organism no bigger than an anchovy fillet that they’ve christened “Calvin”. They’re enraptured by this spirogyra-like being. British scientist Hugh (Ariyon Bakare) delights in twirling the tiny creature at the end of his fingers. His colleagues can’t help but anthropomorphise it. The idea that it might be hostile barely crosses their minds.

Cinematographer Seamus McGarvey throws in lots of long takes of the characters floating around the space ship. Ryan Reynolds plays Rory, a wise-ass astronaut, goading the Brits over their lack of hygiene (they’re an “under-washed nation” he jokes). Jake Gyllenhaal’s character Dr David Jordan has been in space for well over 400 days and is a dreamy and idealistic figure.

Rebecca Ferguson’s Dr Miranda North is overseeing safety procedures, making sure there are enough firewalls in place to ensure nothing goes wrong. Hiroyuki Sanada is the laidback Japanese engineer whose wife has just given birth to a baby back home on earth. Olga Dihovichnaya’s close-cropped but glamorous Russian astronaut Katerina is the closest to Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in Alien.

They’re in touch with Earth, giving interviews to doe-eyed kids who ask them questions like: “how do you go to the bathroom in space?” With all the characters so relaxed, we know that it is only a matter of time until something terrible happens.

Life - TV Spot - Trailer

Even at the grimmest moments, Espinosa looks for the visual poetry. This can be very macabre. If someone is vomiting blood, he’ll show slow motion footage of little red beads floating in the air. There’s a certain grotesque lyricism, too, to the scenes in which the creature slithers its way down characters’ throats or curls around them in a python-like embrace. In the universe the director conjures up here, everything becomes threatening. A kids’ bedtime story like Goodnight Moon takes on a sinister quality.

The six crew members are all consummate professionals who know exactly how to behave if something goes wrong. This makes it all the more jarring when they realise how helpless they are. The tone of the storytelling gradually begins to shift. An air of unease creeps in.

We may be in a spaceship but Life has elements both of the serial killer genre and of the haunted house movie. The filmmakers use the architecture of the ship – its labyrinthine corridors, hatches and door locks – to create a sense of menace. This little filament-like creature is “all muscle, all brain, and all eye”. It needs food and oxygen to survive. If that means killing off the humans one by one, it will do so. As the tension rises, we hear pounding electronic music on the soundtrack.

Life Featurette - Encounter

Just occasionally, Espinosa’s approach becomes repetitive. More than once, a character slams a hatch shut just as the creature lands with a squelching thud on the glass. We see it face to face with the humans. As the crew members become more desperate, they begin to behave like pest exterminators with a bug they just can’t kill. They try to suffocate it, to incinerate it, to flush it away into outer space, to stun it and to chop it up but this is one life form they just can’t erase.

Espinosa contrasts microscopic visual detail – shots of fingers in a glove being crushed or of display panels turning an ominous red – with sequences showing space in its vastness. Inevitably, characters have to venture outside the space station to make vital repairs or to try to dislodge Calvin. He (and we assume he is a “he”) is implacable and very cunning. “Calvin doesn’t hate us but he has to kill us in order to survive,” is the most optimistic gloss any of the crew members can put on the creature’s ever more malevolent behaviour.

One challenge that sci-fi movies like this always face is how to balance the sublime elements with the sometimes very corny genre conventions. At times here, Espinosa seems uncertain as to whether this is a film exploring the mysteries of the cosmos or a B-movie fairground ride. For all its lurches in tone, this is enjoyable and provocative storytelling which manages again and again to make us shudder and jump. Its characters react to their predicament rationally and courageously but when they’re up against a creature like Calvin, that is never going to be enough.