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How do you follow an Oscar winner like Parasite? In Bong Joon-ho's latest film, a screwball sci-fi, Robert Pattinson keeps dying and being 'reborn'

- Ellen E Jones

We are in the run-up to the release of Bong Joon-ho's latest, Mickey 17, and Warner Bros has got the Oscar-winning Korean director stashed away in what appears to be some kind of basement storage room, with greypainted brickwork and exposed wiring. In fact, this room could pass for one of the "gritty and kind of nasty" cargo container-packed cabins of his film's spaceship setting.

Not that anyone is complaining. Bong, who speaks good English but prefers to conduct interviews via his longtime interpreter Sharon Choi, appears cheerful throughout our conversation, taking occasional sips from a takeaway coffee cup, while dressed in his usual arthouse auteur uniform of a slate-grey blazer over a black T-shirt.

He is, for example, completely sanguine about the fact that this follow-up to 2019's Parasite is only now reaching our screens, 12 months after its slated release date. Mickey 17 wasn't the only production delayed by 2023's Screen Actors Guild strikes, he points out, and besides: "My films are quite complicated in terms of distributing and marketing. It's hard to pinpoint exactly how to package and when to release, because it's a mix of so many different genres."

That is certainly true of Mickey 17, which might best be described as a blackly comic, satirical sci-fi-crime caper. It stars Robert Pattinson as the dopey and desperate Mickey Barnes, who signs up to work a dangerous job on a spacecolonising mission, led by a despotic ex-congressman (Mark Ruffalo) and his unhinged wife (Toni Colette).