Australian indie sci-fi flick Expired (aka Loveland) is not an easy film to characterise. Yet any credit writer-director Ivan Sen might be given for the movie’s distinctive ambience, has to be weighed against the fact that this is a style of filmmaking seemingly unconcerned with the need to engage an audience.

Set in near-future Hong Kong, assassin-for-hire Jack (Ryan Kwanten) finds himself strangely drawn to April (Jillian Nguyen), a singer-for-hire in a seedy but sterile pseudo-brothel. When he approaches her outside the safety of the club, she accepts his advances, and the couple begins a gentle courtship. As Jack’s health worsens, he goes in search of a doctor named Bergman (Hugo Weaving) – a mysterious recluse immersed in the science of extending natural lifespans. As the lovers unearth long-buried secrets, they consider what free will they still possess and what the fate of humanity might ultimately be.

If that all sounds a little overblown and pretentious, that’s because it is – at least in the way that Sen approaches the material. The extensive location filming does deliver evocative, atmospheric visuals. But the city framed on screen is very clearly present day Hong Kong with a few CGI embellishments (“a Poundland Blade Runner” as one critic rather harshly suggested). And, presumably at Sen’s insistence, Kwanten and Nguyen both rein in their performances to such a degree that even the fragile romance at the centre of the story seems almost devoid of emotion. Only Weaving gets any real chance to emote, balancing that against his character’s responsibility to articulate the plot’s sketchy technobabble. Even though it’s reasonably pretty to look at, Expired still ends up feeling oddly vacant.

EXPIRED is available in the UK on streaming platforms including Prime Video https://amzn.to/3HSPN4U