Liz Jensen is the author who wrote the 2008 novel The Ninth Life of Louis Drax about a nine-year-old French boy named Louis Drax, who unfortunately was accident prone. He was a very bright, insightful, bewildering youth who throughout the novel told his story with very energetic language of his inner and outer life. His parents were shown to be in a marriage that appeared to be falling apart and Louis believed he was the cause for the problems. To celebrate Louis’s ninth birthday, the family had a picnic in the country, where both Louis and his father fell over a cliff. His father disappeared in the river below while Louis ended up in a coma. Before this accident, Louis nearly died eight other times, from a few serious illnesses such as botulism and meningitis. In the beginning, the reader was never totally sure what caused Louis’s fall, but due to the disappearance of his father, he was considered responsible.
The remainder of the novel dealt with Louis’s doctor, Pascal Dannachet, who was trying to figure out Louis’s illness and while doing this, became involved with Natalie, Louis’s mother, a very mentally puzzling woman. When they kissed, Louis seemed to see it happen and sat straight up in his bed, then settled down, but soon after this, mysterious letters began to show up. At this point in the book, the reader is introduced to an another voice and it is that of the doctor, who is a specialist in comas and can figure out what happens in the inner world of a coma victim. The doctor’s personal life was not that great and did not improve after he started Louis’s treatment. The doctor even began to start sleepwalking, clearly showing a psychic connection between himself and Louis, who had been giving direction to the doctor to write the threatening notes. Louis seemed to defy all medical logic concerning comas; he even lapsed into death, but returned to the living in a miraculous physical move. The mystery was solved in the end when the reader learned that Louis deliberately fell off the cliff into the ravine while his father tried to stop him, but who fell and was eventually found dead at the bottom of the cliff. The book was well written and showed the misperceptions and misinterpretations children and adults see in one another in the world around them and they learned to distinguish what is and what might be.
The supernatural thriller film based on the above novel attempts to accomplish the same thing as did the novel and was direct by Alexandre Aja, and adapted to the screen by Max Minghella. It starred Jamie Dornan as Dr. Allan Pascal (a change in name from the book), Sarah Gadon as Natalie Drax, Aiden Longworth as Louis Drax, Oliver Platt as Dr. Perez, Molly Parker as Dalton, Julian Wadham as Dr. Jane, Barbara Hershey as Violet (Louis’s grandmother), Jane Mc Gregor as Sophie, and Aaron Paul as Peter Drax (Louis’s father).
The film’s story follows the plot line of the novel starting with Louis Drax’s ninth birthday where he has a near fatal fall and ends up in a coma. Dr. Pascal is his doctor who looks for the strange circumstances that can explain the young child’s accidents and coincidences that have followed him during his short life. It is shown in the beginning all the accidents this young child has had from electrocution, to spider bites, to almost drowning. All of this raise the question has to how effectively he has been raised by his parents which cumulated with his fall from the cliff and ending in the coma. Much of the film used voiceover by Aiden Longworth (Louis - remember he’s in a coma, but we need to “hear” from him to understand what’s going on in his mind while in this deep sleep.) Flashback is also used to explain his relationship with the child psychologist Dr. Perez (Oliver Platt) who has been included in the film to provide exposition. We are lead through the visuals of the film and through the good acting of Aaron Paul as Louis’s step-father Peter Drax that he is the culprit and responsible for pushing Louis’ off the cliff and who it would appear has left town and cannot be found. Dr. Pascal, the coma expert, is played by Jamie Dornan, who tries to help Louis believing in supernatural phenomena and having experienced a similar childhood trauma. Thanks to the gifted mind of Aja, he, along with the adapter Minghella, have added a swamp thingy to Louis’s coma imagination suggesting strongly that all the accidents could be of a supernatural being.
It seemed that Louis Drax was ready to leave this world. It was not a tearjerker like other young adult reader adapted films but had a much different attitude about terminal kid stories. The film had some style…a good musical score, a somewhat typical classic mystery noir (Dornan’s character falls for the woman and composite characters who get in his way) plus the addition of the wonderful Barbara Hershey as the grandmother and let’s not forget some freaky activity on Dr. Pascal’s behavior in the coma ward and the garden slug images. The dream sequences were handled in typical Aja style, but the entire film was disappointing…at best. It just never came together. GRADE: 2 of 5 crowns
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