Self/less (2015)

Self/less arrives with the posture of a film that has something to say about mortality, class, and the ownership of the human body. It says it, eventually, through a flamethrower. Tarsem Singh's 2015 thriller begins with a dying billionaire, Damian Hale, purchasing the young body of a man who sold himself to cover his daughter's medical treatment. That premise carries a genuine class-exploitation charge. The rich man literally wears the poor man's flesh. The film stages this idea with some conviction and then loses interest in favor of chases, motel research montages, and a final confrontation that settles the ethical questions through violence. The result is a strange specimen: a movie with a radical premise and an action-film nervous system.

On the representation front, the film is mostly a white ensemble with Natalie Martinez and Derek Luke in supporting roles that the story treats as ordinary people, not symbols. Women appear as a wife and an estranged daughter whose emotional lives are folded into the male protagonist's arc. There is no feminist framing, no racial commentary, no LGBTQ presence, no climate concern, and no body-positivity argument. The premise in fact depends on the desirability of a young, conventionally attractive body. A character's Alzheimer's functions as a plot obstacle and nothing more. The film is a fictional sci-fi thriller with no interest in the historical record. These absences are not failures of the film's craft. They are simply the boundaries of its imagination.

The film gestures at transhumanism and the ethics of body-selling, but it prefers to resolve its ideas through gunfire and a malfunctioning machine. The moralizing stays minimal. The film leaves us with a slick, moody B-picture about a rich man learning that the body he bought belongs to someone with a family. The satire is available for anyone who wants to pick it up. The film will not hand it to you.