Six years after his Best Picture-winning Parasite, Bong Joon-ho returns with a blockbuster unlike any other.

Dissatisfied with life on Earth, Mickey Barnes decides to become an ‘expendable’. He’s put to work performing highly dangerous tasks on a distant human colony, and cloned every time he dies (17 so far). He soon begins to question his identity and the underlying ethics of a civilisation so willing to cut and paste its own subjects.

Mickey 17 isn’t Joon-ho’s first foray in science fiction, following 2013’s excellent Snowpiercer. Yet, like Mickey himself, the film defies any singular identity, hopping genres from one scene to the next by melding elements of black comedy, searing human drama and sharp political satire. Featuring a star-studded cast including an ever-reliable Robert Pattinson, and all the incisive writing and cinematography of Parasite, it’s one of the year’s few big-budget films based on an original idea.