It is extremely on-brand that, in adapting the sci-fi novel Mickey 7, director Bong Joon-ho decided to kill the protagonist 10 more times. If you’ve seen Bong’s movies before, you could probably see this coming. In this film, as in his other sci-fi films like Snowpiercer and Okja, villains aren’t just evil, they’re mustache-twirling, tied-someone-to-the-train-tracks evil. The cruelty is fantastically cruel. The cute and rotund are unbearably cute and rotund. No one pukes just one color. 

That said, the 10 extra deaths are a good editorial call. The dying is the best part of Mickey 17, due in no small part to Robert Pattinson’s commitment to the role. Pattinson plays Mickey, a hapless would-be macaroon entrepreneur who signs on to be full-body scanned and turned into an endlessly reprintable “expendable” spaceman. The blankness that served him so well as the teenybopper vampire thirst trap of the late 2000s is repurposed into the flat, amiable exterior of a customer service worker just trying to make it to the end of their shift—so that they can get stoned and stare at the ceiling. “It’s a story about working-class people,” Bong recently told the New York Times. “I was attracted by the idea that his job is dying.”

Bong has a notoriously obsessive directing style that begins with drawing a manhwa-like screenplay—each camera shot is sketched beforehand, then replicated on set, with the actors placed in the shot like props, only saying the dialogue necessary for that specific camera angle. That means that, often, actors in Bong’s films are being filmed speaking a single line at a time, at maximum intensity, then having their entire performance of a scene stitched together retroactively. The effect is sort of like watching an old silent film that just happens to have audio you wish you could turn down. 

It takes a certain kind of actor to remain engaging under this pressure—and that’s not most of the actors in this movie. The most naturalistic performances come from the CGI aliens rendered by Bong’s longtime creature-building collaborator, Jang Hee-cheol, which are kind of like a tardigrade crossed with a roly poly. “In the very early stage of creature design, we shared many images of armadillo,” Bong told the Times, “also croissant.” Likelihood is high that the deft alien performances are because the CGI is less under Bong’s control than Mark Ruffalo (playing essentially Snidely Whiplash) and Toni Colette (cast here as a lovechild of Phyllis Schlafly and Cruella de Vil).

Watching this at a packed screening, I wondered how a movie with so many isolated charming moments (the sly humor, the set design, Naomi Ackie playing Mickey’s extremely-out-of-his-league love interest) was making me so queasy. Supposedly funny stuff was happening on the screen, but no one around me was laughing.

Here’s a theory: Given recent political events, a black comedy about social stratification, even in space, is a lot. The villain is a jizz-obsessed eugenicist politician and religious zealot. In the background of one scene, some of his followers are wearing what look suspiciously like MAGA hats. (Just a coincidence! says Bong. Lots of jerks out there!). Coincidence or not, the closer Ruffalo’s sweaty forehead got to the camera, the further I slid down in my seat. I go to the movies, I thought, to get away from this.

Mickey 17 opens in wide release on Fri March 7.