The 9th Life of Louis Drax
The 9th Life of Louis Drax is a 2016 psychological thriller directed by Alexandre Aja, in which a 9-year-old boy who has already survived 8 near-fatal accidents goes over a clifftop on his ninth birthday and lies in a coma while the doctor treating him tries to establish what happened up there. It runs 108 minutes, Max Minghella wrote it from Liz Jensen's 2004 novel The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, and it opened in the United States and the United Kingdom on the same day, 2 September 2016.
Two facts make the film worth a reference of its own rather than a listing. Anthony Minghella bought the novel for the screen before it was printed and then died before he could film it, so the adaptation reached cinemas 12 years after the book. And the book is narrated from inside a coma by a boy who cannot speak, move or be seen to think. Almost every change the film makes follows from that second problem.
What happens to Louis Drax in the film
What happens to Louis Drax is a fall, a coma and an investigation into which of his parents put him there. Louis, played by Aiden Longworth, opens the film by narrating his own catalogue of disasters: he has survived 8 accidents that should have killed him, and he treats the list as a private joke. On his ninth birthday the family drives out to a picnic on a cliff above the Pacific. Louis goes over the edge, is pronounced dead, and revives. He is admitted to the coma unit of Dr Allan Pascal, played by Jamie Dornan, who specialises in patients who are not expected to come back.
From there the film runs three lines at once. Pascal treats the body and becomes drawn to the boy's mother, Natalie Drax, played by Sarah Gadon. Detective Dalton, played by Molly Parker, hunts for the missing father, Peter Drax, played by Aaron Paul, whom Natalie's account puts on the clifftop in a rage. And Dr Perez, the child psychologist played by Oliver Platt who had been seeing Louis before the fall, supplies the film with its record of what the boy was actually like. Letters arrive at the unit that appear to have been written by Louis himself. Inside the coma, Louis is not alone: he has a bandaged, sea-worn companion who talks to him, the figure the novel names Gustave.
The novel a director bought before it was printed
The novel came first, and its film rights were sold before anyone could read it. Liz Jensen, born in Oxfordshire in 1959 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2005, published The Ninth Life of Louis Drax with Bloomsbury in 2004; the American edition runs to 240 pages. Anthony Minghella secured the rights ahead of publication, under a Miramax option, intending to write and direct it himself. He died in 2008 and the project stopped.
It moved again in August 2014, with a screenplay by his son Max Minghella, his first produced script, and Alexandre Aja attached to direct. Max Minghella produced alongside Tim Bricknell, and Miramax remained among the production companies. Publishers Weekly, reviewing the novel on 8 November 2004, expected sales in the class of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Life of Pi, which is a fair measure of how the book was read at the time: a literary thriller with a child's voice at the centre of it.
Where the film and the novel part company
Film and novel part company first on the map and then on the microphone. Jensen sets the fall at a ravine in the Auvergne and the recovery at a coma clinic in Provence; the family is French, the father is Pierre, and the doctor is Pascal Dannachet. Minghella's script moves the whole thing to the northern Californian coast, keeps Natalie and Louis, renames the father Peter, and turns the novel doctor's forename into the film doctor's surname.
Two first-person voices in alternation: Louis, narrating from inside the coma, and Dr Dannachet, narrating his own slide into the Drax family. The reader is inside the boy's head for most of the book and never sees him from outside.
One voice-over, Louis's, laid over a film that mostly watches Dr Pascal. The boy's interior is externalised: a coma landscape you can see, and a creature you can point a camera at.
This reference judges every adaptation on the same 4 points, kept separate because they travel at different speeds: plot, character, voice and theme. Here the plot survives, the characters survive with new passports, the theme is largely intact, and the voice takes almost all the damage.
Where it was filmed, and why the coast is not French
Filming took place in British Columbia, between 27 October and 15 December 2014, with additional work in San Francisco and on Yerba Buena Island. The relocation is visible in the finished film: the picnic sits in the hills of Marin County, and the Golden Gate Bridge appears through cloud. Maxime Alexandre, who had shot Aja's earlier films, photographed it; Patrick Watson wrote the score; Baxter cut it.
The change of country is not a neutral swap. A French provincial clinic gives the novel a flatness of tone; a cliff above the Pacific gives the film scale, fog and a drop the audience can measure. Aja, who came to the project after Haute Tension, The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors and an earlier novel adaptation in Horns, shoots the coma as a submerged place rather than a white void.
What it took, and what critics made of it
It took $509,725 worldwide, with no separate North American gross reported, small even for a limited release, and the reviews were mixed to poor. Rotten Tomatoes records 38 per cent positive from 65 reviews, average rating 5.15 out of 10. Metacritic gives it 41 out of 100 from 20 reviews. The recurring complaint is not that the film is inert but that it holds 4 tones at once and never chooses between them: a boy's black comedy, a doctor's romance, a police procedural and a monster.
Why this one film is the case the reference is built on
This film is the founding case because it fails and succeeds in the exact place the subject lives. A novel whose whole effect is an unreliable child narrating from a state in which narration is impossible is the hardest thing there is to film, and the record of what a competent director and a first-time screenwriter did with it teaches more than a smooth success would. The distance between The Ninth Life of Louis Drax and The 9th Life of Louis Drax is not a failure of fidelity. It is a translation between 2 machines that do different things, and it is measurable change by change.