Bong Joon-ho is back, and this time he’s swapping class warfare for existential dread. The Oscar-winning director behind Parasite takes a bold leap into sci-fi territory with Mickey 17, a genre-bending, darkly comic meditation on identity, labour and what it means to be human — all wrapped up in a wildly entertaining package.

Adapted from Edward Ashton’s 2022 novel Mickey7, the film stars Robert Pattinson as Mickey Barnes, a low-ranking worker on an unforgiving ice planet, where human life is cheap and clones are even cheaper. Whenever Mickey dies on the job — and it happens a lot — a fresh version is printed, memories intact, ready to pick up where the last one left off. But things get complicated when Mickey 17 is mistakenly presumed dead, only to return and find Mickey 18 already occupying his bunk, his relationships, and his sense of purpose. What follows is part existential crisis, part slapstick nightmare, with...