Akram Khan's Creature, The Film ★★★★★

Creature is choreographer Akram Khan’s third commission for English National Ballet (ENB). It’s also the most problematic.

The work was two years in the making, with two prospective opening dates postponed due to Covid restrictions. It finally had its world premiere at Sadler’s Wells in September 2021. Inspired by Georg Büchner’s seminal 19th-century play Woyzeck, the story of a poor demobbed soldier driven to madness and murder by ever more extreme experiments carried out on him by an army doctor, it has echoes, too, of Frankenstein.

Set in a dilapidated former Arctic research station, Creature follows the grinding down of the title character, from whom, in the name of science, everything is gradually taken away: his dignity, his health, his sanity and finally Marie, the woman he loves.

That’s the short synopsis; in terms of narrative there isn’t much more to this 90-minute work and what there was on stage was confused, unclear and, at times, deeply frustrating.

Can film help Creature overcome its greatest problems? Certainly, when the film-maker is multi-award-winner Asif Kapadia, the author of such immersive documentaries as Senna, on motor-racing driver Ayrton Senna, Amy, on the tragically short life of singer Amy Winehouse (it remains the highest grossing British documentary of all time at the UK box office), and Diego Maradona.

Kapadia uses the resources of film to great effect. He inserts brief, not quite subliminal, images that clarify the narrative. Very early on we have a shot of a white frozen landscape, with an Arctic fox crossing the screen. Now we know what we could only guess at on stage, that what surrounds the cabin interior where the whole work is set, is a hostile, unimaginably cold terrain.

Also, a leitmotif of the film is a very brief image of a space rocket in flight, indicating that the cruel experiments the Creature endures are perhaps a preliminary to the colonisation of distant planets. The soundtrack starts with an extract from President Nixon’s phone call to the first men on the moon, praising them for opening up new frontiers. At what cost? Kapadia’s film asks.

Artists of English National Ballet in Creature. Photo courtesy of BFI Distribution and English National Ballet

More importantly, Kapadia chooses to focus closely on the dancers. The physical stage disappears and instead the viewer is right there with the characters. The film opens with a close-up of the hunched Creature’s back, and pans slowly through his arms, hands and finally a harrowed, uncomprehending face.

We knew from the stage performance that Jeffrey Cirio was superlative as the Creature; the film boosts his performance to heart-rending levels.The other victim of this scientific outfit, the servant Marie, is danced by ENB principal Erina Takahashi, and whereas on stage she seemed woefully underused, by focusing stubbornly on her immensely expressive face the film shows her as a very human protagonist.

On the other side of the spectrum, the lingering close-ups make the sadism of The Major, danced by a villainous Fabian Reimair, almost unbearable.

Does Kapadia’s Creature entirely resolve the work’s problems? No, of course not: halfway through the narrative sags and our attention wavers; and Khan’s Creature remains a one-note, unremittingly bleak work entirely lacking in light and shade.

However, Kapadia’s intelligent approach makes his Creature an excellent, haunting film, in the process showcasing remarkable dancing from the entire ENB cast.

Creature will be in UK cinemas on Friday 24 February.