Creature: Asif Kapadia’s ballet film is impressive but impenetrable

As a director, Asif Kapadia is somewhat unpredictable. His award-winning debut feature, The Warrior (2001), was a strikingly mythic drama set in the mountains of Rajasthan. After a couple more features – The Return (2005), a disappointingly drab ghost story; and Far North (2007), an exotic tale set in the Svalbard archipelago, and something of a return to form – Kapadia switched to non-fiction, turning out three highly acclaimed documentaries: Senna (2010), about the champion racing driver Ayrton Senna, who died in a crash aged 34; Amy (2015), on the even more short-lived singer Amy Winehouse; and Maradona (2019), on the controversial Argentine footballer. All three films sensitively explored the price of fame.

Now, Kapadia has made another unexpected swerve – into his first ballet movie. Dancer and choreographer Akram Khan’s ballet Creature was premiered in September 2021 at Sadler’s Wells by the English National Ballet. Set in a research station in the Arctic, it shows a being human in appearance but known simply as ‘Creature’, cruelly experimented upon by a military unit to see how it might react to conditions in outer space. The theme is said to have been inspired by Georg Büchner’s unfinished 1836 play Woyzeck and Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein.

But watching Kapadia’s film, which I gather – having not seen Khan’s ballet on stage – closely follows its source material, moviegoers might be likely to recall a much more recent and strikingly similar story: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017). There, too, a non-human creature is captured for experimental purposes and held in a grim research centre, where it’s pitied and loved by a female cleaner. Kapadia’s treatment, though, lacks the wit, and the tenderness, that del Toro brought to his fable.

Khan’s choreography is vigorous and emphatic to the point of overstatement, matched by Vincent Lamagna’s pounding orchestral score, which at one point makes extensive use of the main theme from Ravel’s Bolero. Occasionally we hear voices on the soundtrack; at the start of the movie it’s Richard Nixon’s grandiose phone call to Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin after their moon landing of 1969: “Because of what you have done, the heavens have become part of man’s world.” Later there are sotto voce comments – voiced by Andy Serkis – telling us the outside temperature and the CO2 levels around this Arctic station, or adding enigmatic remarks like, “It’s all in the atoms.”

Tim Yip’s set consists of a huge bare log cabin, with light creeping in between the long horizontal wooden slats. From time to time one or two of these logs fall, indicating the fracturing relationships between the main characters; at the end of the film, dozens of them collapse, letting the fog and glare of the Arctic exterior stream in and flood the set as the Creature slumps hopelessly to the floor – suggesting, possibly, the failure of the experiment.

The overall message of the ballet, and of the film – as signalled by the initial use of the Nixon phone-call – would seem to be a warning against the dangerous arrogance of mankind’s proposed colonisation of other worlds, even while destroying our own. But this isn’t made explicit, and Creature could equally be read as a parable of ruthless racist exploitation. Or, indeed, both. But then ballet is perhaps not the ideal medium for nuanced messages.

The five principal roles are taken by the same dancers who appeared in the stage production. As the Creature, Jeffrey Cirio vividly conveys the character’s bemusement and anguish, his contorted limbs sometimes in sync with the troupe representing the soldiers, sometimes in contrast to them. His interaction with Marie, the cleaner, played by Erina Takahashi, is suffused with the pathos of their precarious mutual attraction. But Fabian Reimar, as the Major, contemptuous of the Creature and brutally lustful towards Marie, is given little scope for anything but a one-note performance. The other two principals, Stina Quagebeur as the Doctor and Ken Saruhashi as the Captain, are under-characterised. The behaviour of Quagebeur’s Doctor in particular seems not so much ambiguous as unclear; does she resent the Major’s attentions to Marie? The energy and panache of the dancing is impressive, but as a whole the film fails to draw our emotional involvement.

Kapadia has observed: “I wanted Creature to be cinema, for people who love films, who love world cinema, the arts, but who perhaps have never seen dance.” It’s a commendable aspiration. Akram Khan’s ballet, though, may not have been the best choice for newcomers.

► Creature is in UK cinemas now.