Asif Kapadia returns with something unlike his previous acclaimed films … but maybe not utterly unlike. Kapadia has become known for intense documentary studies of agonised public figures including Ayrton Senna, Amy Winehouse and Diego Maradona, for whom the glare of attention, and the claustrophobic crush of public adulation, was a kind of addictive ordeal. There are points of similarity in this new, fascinating and perplexingly ambiguous film, something without a clear story, but which admits of any number of readings.
Creature is a filmed theatre project, capturing Akram Khan’s English National Ballet work, also entitled Creature, starring the charismatic dancer Jeffrey Cirio as the Creature, thrillingly athletic and physical, every muscle and tendon visible. The Creature is apparently kept captive in some remote army research unit-slash-prison in the snowy wastes, overseen by a cruel figure called the Major (Fabian Reimair), experimented upon by the Doctor (Stina Quagebeur, who has a distinct Nurse Ratched look), but poignantly befriended by a lowly servant or cleaner called Marie, played by Erina Takahashi.
Bizarrely, the opening section unfolds to a repeated recording of Richard Nixon’s phone call to the Apollo 11 crew on the moon but his reverent phrase “Because of what you have done …” starts to sound like a terrible, mysterious accusation as the Creature gets more and more distressed. The Creature has something of Wozzeck and Frankenstein’s monster, or maybe as if Neil Armstrong was tricked into staying behind on the moon – or even a new version of Captain Oates who has found a way to die inside the tent.
The almost anatomic ferocity and leanness of Cirio’s body in this piece reminded me of Peter Maxwell Davies’s Vesalii Icones, based on the flayed figures from Vesalius’s 16th-century dissection studies, while the bizarre, angular movements of the army here, with their arms out in an empty embrace, have something of the sinister march Julie Taymor devised in her movie version of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. This is an intriguing one-off, reaching out beyond dance connoisseurs to anyone who wants to see something genuinely strange which can’t be pinned down to a single explanation.
• Creature is released on 24 February in UK cinemas.
