In the field of cognitive science, there is a special kind of sound known as a Shepard tone. Invented by the psychologist Roger Shepard, it is constructed from a set of overlapping sine waves, and makes the listener believe they’re hearing a constantly rising pitch. But because of the relationships between the individual waves, and the particular points at which each one swells and fades, the sound itself never actually changes very much: it merely gives an illusory sense of escalation, and a false impression of progress being made.
In Morbius, the latest Spider-Man-adjacent Marvel project from Sony Pictures, the studio may have accidentally created the first Shepard film: it goes on for about an hour and 45 minutes, and right up until the second it ends, you keep feeling as if it’s just about to start.
Jared Leto stars as Michael Morbius, a “living vampire” who has been a member of the Spider-Man rogues’ gallery since the early 1970s. Here he is, a world-renowned haematologist who attempts to cure himself of a rare blood disorder by splicing his own DNA with that of a vampire bat – an experiment that so flies in the face of every principle of medical ethics that it has to be carried out on board a ship in international waters, and which of course yields exactly the result you would expect.
Along with an unquenchable thirst for blood, Morbius gains a thematically appropriate set of super-powers: echolocation; retractable fangs, claws, and snout; the ability to hang from and climb along the ceiling, and so on. The aim seems to have been to make Morbius a sort of swaggering New Romantic antihero – oh-so-enticing but deadly, with dark, flowing locks, a Mephistophelian beard, and a loose white shirt that billows under all atmospheric conditions. Alas, his computer-generated bat-like facial features slightly undermine the effort, and leave him looking more like a cross between Russell Brand and a Barbary macaque.
Leto throws himself into the role with a steely commitment that would be easier to understand if the film surrounding him weren’t so thuddingly generic. When an early flashback shows the young Michael’s arrival at a children’s hospital in Greece, where he meets the doctor who will become his lifelong mentor (Jared Harris) and befriends Milo, the fellow patient who will grow into his future arch-enemy, you can already hear the plot mechanisms creaking like a galleon’s hull. And all that follows – the frenzied late-night research, the fateful injection of the vampire serum carried out by Morbius’s wary love interest Dr Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona), the test-driving of the powers on disposable hoodlums, and so on – is origin story by rote.
