UK Release Date: 09-06-2008
Price: £12.99
UK Certificate: 15
Director: Julien Leclercq
Country: France
Distributor: Momentum

This French SF noir thriller set in a cold-hearted near-future provides a compelling narrative punctuated by explosive violence.

In the opening scene, granite-faced Europol Police officer David Hoffmann’s (Albert Duponte) pursuit of rogue Bulgar­ian intelli­gence agent Dmitri Nicolov (Alain Figlarz) plunges him into a shocking personal tragedy and a high-level intrigue – one that involves Professeur Brügen (Marthe Keller), a world-class surgeon who performs remote holographic surgery via satellite-linked robots from the other side of the world. She is also at the cutt­ing edge of a technology that can digitise memory and wipe it clean like a hard drive – a technology she uses on the ruined body of her own daughter after a horrific car crash, and one which has dangerous implications when it falls into the wrong hands. Minds need new bodies when the old are ruined beyond repair.

In a film in which state-of-the-art technology can, in the words of a crass pathologist, “nuke the mind like it was fried in the microwave”, memory is pain. As the film progresses, it is a telling moment when a character with a damaged personality but a function­ing memory moves impassively through a brutal world, but when left with no memory to draw on, finally dares to feel.

Influences abound, most not­ably George Franju’s 1959 horror film Les Yeux sans visage/Eyes Without a Face, in which a brilli­ant surgeon embarks on a bout of body-snatching to restore the beauty of his daughter, horribly disfigured in a car accident.

The spirit of Philip K Dick – via Blade Runner (the façade of a personality using borrowed memory) and Minority Report (in some of the slick holographic technology on display) – is never far away, either, while the monochrome tints of a futuristic Paris sans joie de vivre recalls the bloodless Japan of Shinsuke Sato’s Princess Blade. As in that film, the monochrome milieu only serves to heighten the visc­eral, hand-to-hand action scenes, which are excellent. Incidentally, Figlarz, who plays the thoroughly sadistic Nicolov, was one of the stunt coordinators on The Bourne Identity; the shadowy interest of the intelli­gence community in the manipulation of character and memory is a link of another kind to Robert Ludlum’s amnesiac spy.

Chrysalis provides 94 minutes of involving storyline energised by some abrupt narrative cuts which serve to intensify its pervasively edgy atmosphere. Ironically, in a film about the power of memory, it’s hard to escape a pervasive feeling of déjà vu – but ultimately the film remains imprinted on the brain long enough to justify its running time.