In Aude Léa Rapin’s sci-fi drama, Planet B, the French government has imprisoned dissidents in a virtual prison. Bodies are kept in a vegetative state inside a top secret black site while their avatars (i.e., identical digital facsimiles of the characters) wander a picturesque, seaside villa. There they are subjected to psychological warfare and enhanced interrogations in an effort to break a populist uprising condemned as domestic terrorism. It’s a dystopian premise that incorporates recognizable elements of The Matrix and The Prisoner and features international stars like Adèle Exarchopoulos and Souheila Yacoub (Dune: Part Two) while nodding at hot button topics such as the global creep of authoritarianism, the exploitation of immigrants, torture, and Metaverse-like virtual realities. It also stands up to exactly zero scrutiny as either an allegory for much of anything or as simply a high-concept take on the jail break movie. In going full “ripped from the headlines,” Rapin loses the thread entirely. Planet B jogs in place while making broad gestures to societal ills that we’re meant to understand could someday lead to far-flung scenarios just like this. But the film never remotely makes the argument why anyone would bother with all this technocratic nonsense or why allowing the unconscious mind to lounge by a virtual pool all day amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. It’s still all the drudgery, manpower, and warehousing of prison, only the film gets to stage scenes of confinement at a swank Airbnb in the south of France.
Exarchopoulos plays Julia, a lieutenant in a nebulously-defined insurgency striking back against the state in a future 10 years from now. There are passing references to the scourge of fossil fuels, but it mostly feels like the sort of ideologically vague “fight the man” activism you often see in YA literature; it’s the sort of film where more thought has been put into the designer neck tattoos of the character than an actual governing philosophy. When the hideout where Julia is stationed is raided by the police, she inadvertently kills an officer in self-defense before taking a bullet to the face. Awaking after an indeterminate period of time with tellingly no injuries and a discreet “B” engraved just below her eye, Julia inexplicably finds herself in a sprawling oceanside estate along with half a dozen other techno-punk comrades in arms. Although there are abundant signs that the characters are trapped in a virtual space, including invisible force fields that rebuff their efforts to move beyond the perimeter of the house and a confessional room which is a literal black void that allows them to interact with the disembodied voices of their jailors (to say nothing of their grievous injuries having miraculously healed without leaving so much as a scar), Julia and her cohorts still make quixotic attempts to escape during the “day time” while at night they are tormented by spectral visions of their victims, reminding them of their crimes while serving as assaultive, waking nightmares.
On a parallel track, Iraqi refugee Nour (Yacoub) is a week away from being deported from France. A former journalist living under an assumed identity (visas and official papers are now QR codes scanned off of someone’s contact lenses), the only employment she can secure requires being rounded up in a blacked-out passenger van with other undocumented immigrants to do janitorial work at an off-the-books government facility. One night, for reasons that are largely unmotivated — there’s a lot of that going around in this film — she lifts a state-of-the-art VR headset and somehow smuggles it out of the building undetected along with the night’s trash. Stymied in her efforts to hawk it for quick cash, she eventually puts the headset on and finds herself able to freely enter and exit the same virtual prison that houses Julia (the only thing that visually differentiates Nour from the inmates is she lacks the little “B” on her face). Emerging like a ghost, Nour forms a quick kinship with Julia, who conceals Nour’s presence from the other prisoners while using her to pass messages to the outside world. With the government trying to track their expensive, possibly illegal, headset — while being unable to deduce that it was probably one of the financially desperate nighttime cleaning people who stole it — Nour has a precious few days to secure a travel visa that will allow her to escape to Canada, try and free Julia and the rest from Planet B, and publish an article that will bring to light the entire operation.
The overriding issue with Planet B is that it functions as a series of thought-starters that nobody bothered to think through. The film keeps introducing new wrinkles to the premise, but the fallacy behind them starts to become self-evident. For instance, what is the point of constructing a photorealistic virtual prison if it still requires confining someone in an actual prison? If you’re still housing someone, feeding someone (albeit intravenously), providing medical treatment, and employing armed guards to observe the entire operation, that’s just a hat on a hat. Further, the only strategic advantage to tricking someone into believing they’re not incarcerated is squandered if it’s obvious they’re residing within a virtual construct (although the characters are told their actions and words aren’t being observed while in Planet B, everyone still clams up, operating under the assumption they’re being lied to). The film never even comes down on a side as to whether “corporeal” punishment or even death in Planet B has any lasting consequence in the real world, so we’re forced to sit through scenes of the characters’ avatars slaughtering one another where it’s unclear whether we’re simply a reset button away from returning to the status quo. And since we’re asking questions here, if this black site is such a serious security concern, why are they employing unvetted day laborers to dust and empty the wastebaskets?
All the “this could happen” alarmism is merely a fig leaf on what’s ultimately an entirely conventional, low-budget genre film. While the scenes inside Planet B benefit from the production values of being set against the tropical vegetation and cliffs of Saint-Raphaël — the one visual conceit that’s effective here is how, as the population of the prison balloons with new detainees arriving daily, what began as a single-level home keeps “magically” adding stories, the residence starting to resemble a giant Jenga-like tower — the majority of the film is spent observing Yacoub navigating under-dressed and under-lit industrial spaces. The actress spends much of her time hunched over her laptop in darkened stairwells and sub-basements or rushing past sparsely-populated refugee encampments. Everything from the production design to the visual effects to the film’s lighting and photography looks chintzy, like something produced for cable television. It gets to the point where visits to Planet B start to feel like a reprieve from the gloomy squalor of reality, although the film is entirely uninterested in interrogating this contradiction. The same could be said for the relationship that forms between Nour and Julia, which we’re meant to understand is transactional in nature until at some point it evolves into something else. It all leads to a decision late in the film by Nour that defies all logic and everything we know about the character other than serving as a reminder that Exarchopoulos is one of the most beautiful women on earth whose charms seemingly no one is immune to. Perhaps, then, the film is really just meant to be a metaphor for online dating; after all, who hasn’t thrown caution to the wind and made a sweeping, self-defeating gesture for someone they’ve never actually met in person?
Published as part of Rendez-Vous with French Cinema 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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