50 Essential Sci-Fi Films of the 21st Century (So Far)

Described by Leos Carax as a sci-fi film without any science, Holy Motors rails against cinematic conventions from the beginning, opening on the director discovering a cinema full of slumbering patrons and barrelling straight into a perplexing sci-fi fantasy that provokes, stuns, and challenges us.

It’s difficult to say precisely who Denis Lavant plays in Holy Motors, but he is the protagonist, a man who is driven around Paris all day in a limo, adopting the guises of different people - some seemingly real, some imaginary - for his “appointments”. Over the course of one day, and nine such appointments, he becomes a banker, a beggar, a sewer dweller, a motion capture actor, a dying man, an assassin, a gangster, a musician, and a father.

Lavant’s characters walk away from certain death and dip in and out of family lives that can’t possibly be their own, and yet here they are before us, both real and not. Our protagonist ends his journey at a suburban home, where his wife and child are chimpanzees, and we journey on to the Holy Motors depot, where the final scene of the film is the rank of limousines who guide similar players around the city in conversation with each other.

Holy Motors is indubitably an experimental exploration of narrative and the creative process, but the literal meaning of the plot is left up to us individually - open to interpretation and a product of what we each bring to it.