People love horror movies and mystery thrillers in equal measure, at least if viewership habits across virtually every major streaming service are taken at face value, so it was always going to be the case that forgotten mashup The 9th Life of Louis Drax would find its way back into the spotlight eventually.
Sure enough, the ambitiously conceived hybrid of supernatural fable and hard-boiled investigative exploration has come back from the brink of obscurity to secure a place on the most-watched charts of ad-supported platform Freevee, per FlixPatrol. Even though there’s a decent enough premise in play, identical Rotten Tomatoes scores of 38 percent from both critics and audiences highlights that the literary adaptation was nowhere near pulling of its premise with aplomb.
Helmed by horror veteran Alexandre Aja of High Tension, The Hills Have Eyes, Piranha 3D, and Crawl fame, The 9th Life of Louis Drax does at least live up to its title. The titular child has survived many near-death accidents to underline his credentials as the luckiest boy in the world, but his most recent mishap places him into a coma.
Jamie Dornan’s neurologist steps in to dig deeper into how the kid has managed to channel the energies of a cat by scraping through so many near-misses, but ends up being drawn into a revelatory experience that threatens to fundamentally alter his perceptions of reality. As mentioned, there are a lot of intriguing elements at play, but they never quite come close to coalescing into a satisfying whole.