Weird and thought-provoking

Parts of it aren't great, most of it is terrific, but now that I'm home from the cinema and thinking about it, I feel like it's burning a hole in my mind, like the acid blood from the film Alien.

Films take a long time to make, and this one has sat around since last year waiting for the right Australian release date. It feels like it was made for this exact week, so prescient is it about all of the things we're all worried about at this exact moment in time.

In the year 2044, Gabrielle Monnier (Seydoux) lives a listless existence, as plenty do now that AI has taken most of the intellectual jobs and unemployment is at 67 per cent.

Gabrielle is convinced to undergo a procedure to relive moments from her past lives to cleanse trauma from her DNA ,which will reduce her ability to feel emotions and thus make her more employable.

In 1910, Gabrielle is married to Georges (Martin Scali), a dull but successful manufacturer of dolls, but she is being pursued by the charming Louis (George MacKay) who takes her for long walks filled with intellectual discussion.

In 2023 Gabrielle is an unemployed model-actress house-sitting a glass-walled mansion in the Hollywood Hills. This Gabrielle has again drawn the attention of 2023 Louis, a social media-posting misfit whose sociopathic tendencies don't bode well.

In both of the earlier time periods Gabrielle has reached out to a psychic (Marta Hoskins), who gives her the same grim warning, and when Gabrielle meets yet another reincarnation of Louis in her own time, she hopes she might have history on her side this time around.

There are elements of David Cronenberg and JG Ballard in the screenplay from director Bertrand Bonello writing with Guillaume Breaud and Benjamin Charbit, though it is actually drawn from quite an old source, the Henry James short story The Beast in the Jungle.

The Beast is many things, sometimes really obvious ones like the toxic masculinity of Louis from 2023, or it is the sense of anxiety Gabrielle carries with her across her lives - not without merit it turns out. But it is also the whole 2044 world Gabrielle lives in, an apparent paradise but where the citizenry seem thoroughly empty and unfulfilled, a little afraid of and a little resentful towards their AI government.

MacKay is a Brit with an Aussie dad which has brought him to a number of Aussie films in his short but very busy career. His performances here vary. He's so charming in the future and the past, but a jarring and awkward bit of work as the 2023 Louis. I'm going to be generous and put this down to the three French screenwriters' dialogue not translating amazingly well into this one English-speaking timeline. This timeline's Louis is every incel male screaming at us in social media comment sections, furious with the world and directing that anger in all the wrong places.

Seydoux is superlative across all of her timelines, subtly different. It's the kind of knockout performance that ought to have made her an Oscar contender, but the film is too deliberately weird for most people to tolerate. I like weird though, and helping amp it up are wonderful production design and an occasionally very scary soundtrack with a level of bass that you feel in your bowels.