District 9

District 9 (2009) is Neill Blomkamp's sci-fi thriller, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Shot in South Africa with Peter Jackson producing, this debut feature landed four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.

An alien ship stalls over Johannesburg, but no invasion follows. Inside sit over a million starving refugees from a dying world. Earth gives them no peace: the newcomers are herded into a fenced-off slum on the city's edge, the place everyone calls District 9. Twenty years on, bureaucrat Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley) shows up to evict them and accidentally breathes in a strange fluid. His own DNA starts to shift. Soon he becomes the very thing the city loves to hate, and the only place left to hide is among the people he was just clearing out.

Blomkamp built his science fiction as fake documentary, all handheld footage, interviews and news clips. The apartheid echo needs no spelling out. The effects ran on a lean thirty-million budget, and Copley improvised most of his lines. It's grimy, brutal, and refuses a tidy ending. Watch District 9 (2009) online on iFILM.