In the near future, astronauts on the International Space Station retrieve soil samples from Mars and discover a single-cell organism, the first definitive proof of extraterrestrial life.
Once exposed to a fertile atmosphere within the space station, the creature rapidly grows into a gelatinous form that's part star fish, part squid, and all ick.
And, of course, it wants to kill us all.
Life is Gravity with a murderous ET, The Thing in space, and Alien in Earth orbit.
At its core, despite its big name cast (led by Jake Gyllenhaal and Ryan Reynold), it's a cheesy '50s sci-fi B-movie creature feature, just on a much bigger budget... and I think it knows that and embraces the fact.
As well as a "drowning" that hearkens back to James Cameron's The Abyss, there's even a resuscitation scene that homages the infamous sequence from The Thing, but with a cleverly different denouement.
Wholly absorbing from start-to-finish, Life begins in media res and keeps up the rapid pacing for most of its 95-minute duration, only easing off slightly as it heads into the final act - possibly to build tension.
However, despite a couple of unexpected twists along the way and a wonderfully nihilistic Twilight Zone-style ending, there's very little original here plot and story-wise.
The human protagonists, despite a handful of character tics and backstory flags, are largely two-dimensional, there to be sacrificed on the altar of story for the audience's entertainment.
That said, the monster - named Calvin by schoolkids back on Earth - is deliciously Lovecraftian, not because of its tentacles but because of its inhuman alienness and intellect.
A small film, in TV parlance it's like a 'bottle episode', with all the action - until the very end - taking place within the claustrophobic confines of the ISS, but it's also what Joe Bob Briggs would call a "spam-in-a-cabin" horror flick, where everyone is potential meat for the killer.
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