Eco-terrorists, political outlaws and anti-government agitators are exiled to a virtual-reality prison hotel in Planet B, the second dramatic feature from documentary maker turned fiction film writer-director Aude Léa Rapin. Putting a near-future sci-fi spin on contemporary hot-button debates over climate change and illegal immigration, this French-made cyber-thriller is intriguing and ambitious, but also a frustratingly muddled affair that promises more than it delivers. It world premieres in Venice film festival this week as the special opening gala of the Critics’ Week section.
Created by a female-heavy cast and crew, including French screen queen Adèle Exarchopoulos in the lead role, Planet B is ripe with potential, but never milks enough dramatic mileage out of its dystopian Black Mirror set-up as a cautionary fable for the AI age. Rapin’s clunky screenplay will likely prove too slow and talk-heavy for hardcore genre fans, but also too straight for devotees of elevated, cerebral sci-fi cinema. That said, with backing from industry heavyweights Netflix and Studiocanal, this sporadically engaging future-shock yarn should find a healthy audience.
Exarchopoulos plays Julia Bombarth, a key figure in an underground army of Extinction Rebellion-style eco-activists whose trouble-making protests and explosive attacks have attracted a heavy police backlash. The film opens in 2039, just as one of the group’s missions goes wrong, ending in armed confrontation. In the blur of tear-gas and panic, Julia accidentally wounds an officer, perhaps even fatally. She is arrested and sedated, only to wake up in a mysterious hotel on a remote stretch of rocky coastline. Several of her fellow activists share this luxury jail, which has no other guests or staff.
This tropical purgatory, we soon learn, is Planet B, the world’s first “virtual prison”. Wired into VR headsets in the real world, Julia and her fellow inmates live here as avatars trapped inside an ultra-realistic computer game. Stuck in a digital no man’s land somewhere between The Matrix and a high-stakes reality TV show, they become increasingly suspicious of each other, especially when the chance arises to betray comrades in return for more lenient treatment.
In a parallel plotline, Souheila Yacoub plays Nour Hamdi, an exiled Iraqi journalist working menial jobs in France ahead of her imminent deportation. As a harshly controlled and closely monitored political refugee, she is no longer welcome in this dystopian French state. Her residency status, saved as a QR code worn imprinted on a contact lens, is about to expire. A potential escape route to Canada looms, but when she stumbles across evidence of Julia’s legally dubious top-secret detainment on Planet B, Nour’s journalistic instincts kick in. Using subterfuge and underground contacts, she manages to contact Julia, hoping to blow this scandalous story wide open.
Planet B has enough rich ingredients for a great sci-fi scenario, especially the concept of a virtual prison in the form of a sinister boutique hotel, but Rapin seems barely interested in exploring the dramatic dimensions of her own screenplay. Other than a few ghostly apparitions and disorienting jump-cuts from day to night, she mostly conceives this high-tech dreamscape in naturalistic terms, using a visual language closer to vintage cyber-thrillers like Hackers (1995) or Virtuosity (1995) than to our current era of deepfake deception, AI trickery and mind-bending metaverse fantasy.
The internal logic of life on Planet B is also frustratingly fuzzy, with real-world death apparently not possible here, but lethal gun battles still presented as major plot points. The film’s political dimension is disappointingly non-committal too, its climate-change and pro-immigrant slogans mere window dressing to a more old-fashioned thriller about vaguely left-liberal outlaws battling an evil authoritarian state.
Exarchopoulos brings her usual sulky magnetism to a thinly written role, but Yacoub seems a little colourless following a run of more sassy performances, most recently in the Cannes-screened dark comedy The Balconettes. One notable left-field credit is a throbbing electro-rock score by writer-director Bertrand Bonello (Saint Laurent, Nocturama, The Beast), who moonlights here as a composer. Rapin clearly has grand ambitions and starry connections, hopefully her future films will have a little more focus.
Listen to Matt Micucci’s conversation with director Aude Léa Rapin.
Director, screenwriter: Aude Léa Rapin
Cast: Adèle Exarchopoulos, Souheila Yacoub, India Hair, Marc Barbé, Eliane Umuhire
Producer: Eve Robin
Cinematography: Jeanne Lapoirie
Editing: Gabrielle Stemmer
Music: Bertrand Bonello
Production company: Orange Studio
World sales: Studiocanal
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Critics’ Week)
In French, English
119 minutes