Science fiction has always been a fertile genre for telling stories that revolve around mysteries. From Ridley Scott’s classic Blade Runner to Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell, sci-fi and mystery go together as perfectly as a culprit’s hand in a blood-stained glove. Mars Express, the debut feature from French animator-director Jérémie Périn, is further proof of the connection, by taking the basic elements of a Chinatown-esque story about a missing person and a deadly conspiracy, and iterating on them in the far-flung world of colonized space filled with sentient machines and bleeding-edge technology.
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Set in the 23rd century, the film follows Aline Ruby and Carlos Rivera, a pair of private eyes dispatched to Earth to bring in a hacker accused of jailbreaking robots, effectively unshackling them from the safeguards created to keep them docile and subservient to humans. When their investigation hits an unexpected dead end, Aline and Carlos accept another case, this one concerning a college student who mysteriously went missing after her roommate was murdered in their dorm room. In true noir fashion, the pair steadily discover that the two seemingly separate cases are not only in fact deeply intertwined, but pertinent to a plot that threatens the foundations of human-robot society.
Since the late 2000s, Périn has steadily made a name for himself as one of the most creative, boundary-pushing directors in French animation for his work on shows including Lastman, the animated comedy short series Merci Satan, and NSFW music videos for artists like
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