'Love' Film Review

1. Love
2. Production year: 2012
3. Country: USA
4. Cert (UK): 12A
5. Runtime: 84 mins
6. Directors: Michael Haneke, William Eubank
7. Cast: Bradley Horne, Corey Richardson, Emmanuelle Riva, Gunner Wright, Isabelle Huppert, Jean-Louis Trintignant
8. More on this film

With a musical score supplied by the US band Angels & Airwaves, this sci-fi meditation from 29-year-old debutant director William Eubank is a technically accomplished but stiflingly reverential homage to Stanley Kubrick. It often seems like an 80-minute pop video with a 2001 gimmick. There's a "pre-history" sequence: not apes, but soldiers in the US civil war who make a strange discovery. Then we rocket forward centuries to a lone spaceman, Captain Lee Miller (Gunner Wright), in a cramped craft, who receives a disturbingly curt message from Houston. He's on his own. Panic is succeeded by existential horror and hallucinations that somehow trigger a kind of leap to a new consciousness, and we loop in the civil–war discovery. Technically proficient, good-looking – but what's the point?