The 9th Life of Louis Drax: the reviews, and the case since
Critics found The 9th Life of Louis Drax intriguing and incoherent in roughly equal measure, and the aggregate scores are poor: Rotten Tomatoes records 38 per cent positive from 65 reviews with an average rating of 5.15 out of 10, and Metacritic gives it 41 out of 100 from 20 reviews, counting 4 positive, 8 mixed and 8 negative. It took $509,725 worldwide. Tone is the complaint that recurs most often, though the harshest reviews attack the plotting as well.
The numbers, and the spread they conceal
The numbers conceal a distribution that is wide rather than narrow, and weighted towards the bottom. Metacritic's 20 reviews run from 19 to 75, and it sorts them 4 positive, 8 mixed and 8 negative: 8 of the 20 scored the film below 40, 5 of those at 30 or under, and only 4 cleared the 61 that Metacritic treats as positive. A demolition is exactly what most of the low half wrote. The aggregate of 41 is the sum of a film that 4 of its 20 reviewers endorsed and 8 dismissed, not of a press that hovered around the middle.
| Publication | Critic | Metacritic score | Band |
|---|---|---|---|
| Philadelphia Inquirer | Tirdad Derakhshani | 75 | Positive |
| The Seattle Times | Soren Andersen | 75 | Positive |
| TheWrap | Michael Nordine | 66 | Positive |
| RogerEbert.com | Christy Lemire | 63 | Positive |
| The Guardian | Peter Bradshaw | 60 | Mixed |
| Empire | Liz Beardsworth | 60 | Mixed |
| Total Film | Jamie Graham | 60 | Mixed |
| The Film Stage | Jared Mobarak | 58 | Mixed |
| The Globe and Mail | Kate Taylor | 50 | Mixed |
| Village Voice | Bilge Ebiri | 50 | Mixed |
| The A.V. Club | Katie Rife | 50 | Mixed |
| New York Post | Kyle Smith | 38 | Negative |
| Movie Nation | Roger Moore | 38 | Negative |
| The Hollywood Reporter | Sheri Linden | 30 | Negative |
| The New York Times | Neil Genzlinger | 30 | Negative |
| Los Angeles Times | Robert Abele | 30 | Negative |
| Slant Magazine | Ed Gonzalez | 25 | Negative |
| The Washington Post | Pat Padua | 25 | Negative |
| The Verge | Tasha Robinson | 19 | Negative |
Scores are Metacritic's normalisation of each publication's own scale, not marks the critics awarded out of 100. The table lists 19 of the 20 reviews Metacritic counts, high to low; the 1 not shown falls in the mixed band, since the positive and negative bands are complete above. The plain mean of these 19 is 47.5, and Metacritic's 41 sits below it because the aggregate is weighted by publication rather than averaged flat.
The split matters for what follows. The film did not divide critics by a few points, it divided them into 2 groups reading the same object in opposite directions, and the sections below set out each case in turn.
The charge that recurs: tone
Tone is the charge that recurs, in review after review, and it is a structural complaint rather than a matter of taste. The film runs 4 modes in 108 minutes: a boy's deadpan comedy in voice-over, a doctor's romance with the mother of his patient, a police search for a missing father, and a creature in a coma landscape. Kate Taylor in The Globe and Mail found it intriguing and uneven, and could not accept the supernatural material inside the frame the rest of the film had built. Bilge Ebiri in the Village Voice credited the filmmaking and doubted the payoff. Jared Mobarak at The Film Stage found the mystery solvable well before it was solved. Those are the reviewers who scored it in the middle. The low half went further and faulted the plotting itself: Sheri Linden in The Hollywood Reporter judged that confusion had given way to indifference before the pieces came together, Ed Gonzalez in Slant found the incidents untethered from logic, and Tasha Robinson at The Verge, the lowest score of the 20, objected to the twists and the unfinished plot lines rather than to the mixture of registers.
The complaint has a precise cause. Prose can hold 4 registers in a single paragraph, because one voice is carrying all of them; a film has to allocate them to sequences, and sequences arrive one after another. What is a texture in Liz Jensen's novel becomes a running order on screen.
The case the film's defenders made
Defenders made their case on structure and on nerve. Tirdad Derakhshani in the Philadelphia Inquirer and Soren Andersen in The Seattle Times, the 2 highest scores on Metacritic, both argued from the film's construction: the way the coma sequences and the investigation are interleaved, and the way the family is disclosed in layers rather than explained. Christy Lemire at RogerEbert.com placed it in Hitchcock's territory and accepted the magical-realist material as part of the design. Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian treated Alexandre Aja as a horror director working in fantasy thriller and read the sea creature at the edge of the film as inherited from Guillermo del Toro.
The defence and the prosecution are describing the same object. Both agree the film mixes registers; they disagree about whether the mixture is the subject or the problem.
Where it was filmed, and what the location did to the reviews
It was filmed in British Columbia between 27 October and 15 December 2014, with additional work in San Francisco and on Yerba Buena Island, and the relocation shaped a good deal of the criticism. Jensen's novel puts the fall at a ravine in the Auvergne and the recovery at a clinic in Provence. Max Minghella's script moves the story to a cliff above the Pacific in the hills of Marin County, and Maxime Alexandre photographs it with San Francisco under cloud in the distance. Reviewers who praised the film's look almost all pointed at the coast and at the underwater imagery; reviewers who found it precious pointed at the same shots.
How the reception compares with the novel's
The reception of the 2 versions is a study in what each medium is graded on.
Reviewed in 2004 as a literary thriller carried by its narrator. Kirkus moved from comedy through suspense to a conclusion it found devastating; Publishers Weekly, on 8 November 2004, put its commercial prospects alongside The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Life of Pi.
Reviewed in 2016 on tonal consistency, a criterion the novel was never held to. 38 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, 41 on Metacritic, and a recurring verdict that the parts are better than the assembly.
The case the film has gained since
The case the film has gained since 2016 is not a documented critical reappraisal, and this reference will not manufacture one. What has changed is the frame. Aja's subsequent work, including Crawl in 2019 and Oxygen in 2021, made it easier to read Louis Drax as a director's experiment rather than a botched thriller, and the film is now most often written about by people interested in the adaptation problem it was trying to solve. Seen as a thriller it is uneven, which is the mildest of the things the 2016 reviews said. Seen as an attempt to photograph a first-person novel narrated from inside a coma, the interesting question is not whether it succeeds but which of the 4 things a novel does it decided it could afford to lose.