Radioactive review: Rosamund Pike is harrowing as Marie Curie

Strong performances from Rosamund Pike and Sam Riley, coupled with deft direction from Marjane Satrapi, elevate Radioactive beyond standard Oscar-bait biopic fare.

It’s been a while since we’ve sat down and strapped ourselves in for a proper biopic. You know the kind: the two-and-a-half-hour or more, aggressively color-graded vehicle for whichever actor has decided that this year is the year they’ll be gunning hard during awards season. So, hungry for a little prestige historical drama, we sat down for Marjane Satrapi’s Radioactive.

Starring Rosamund Pike, Radioactive is a historical drama that serves as a biography of the life of famed scientist Marie Curie, who forever changed the course of history when she (along with the help of her husband Pierre) discovered the element radium, which led to the popularization (and weaponization) of radioactivity.

While this is, admittedly, a biopic first and anything else second, we did appreciate just how much time Satrapi spent exploring not just Curie’s life, but the historical ripples that her work would create, even long after her death. For the most part, Radioactive is a very straightforward film (in turms of narrative structure, that is). But every now and then, the film has little interludes that explore important events throughout history that were made possible by Curie’s research — particularly the invention, testing, and detonation of nuclear bombs during World War II.

These little vignettes are so tonally different from the rest of the film that they serve as sort of palette cleansers, waking you up and reminding you of the gravity of the events you’re watching — and that Curie’s life and struggles went far beyond just impacting those close to her. For better or for worse, her discoveries impacted millions of lives. But as the film explores, her work wreaked havoc on almost all of her personal relationships.

For the first half of the film, we meet and come to quickly fall in love with Pierre Curie (played with infinite charm by Sam Riley), and Radioactive acts almost as a romance between the outgoing, kindly Pierre and the shrewd, driven Marie. Riley and Pike have great chemistry, and we found their relationship to be incredibly genuine and believable. The duo had their struggles, but they never felt overblown or fictitious. Instead, they stemmed from genuine differences between two very contrasting personalities, but anyone could see that the two were always very much in love.

Which makes it all the more painful when Pierre is suddenly killed in an accident — captured by Satrapi with a brutal simplicity that stuck with us for the rest of the film’s runtime. After Pierre’s departure, despite Pike doing her best to keep us hooked, something is missing. Just as Marie’s life was incomplete without Pierre, the film suffers with his departure. And because he dies relatively early, it becomes difficult to justify such a padded runtime when all the discoveries she will make have already been made, and there’s still an hour left.

As we mentioned previously, Pike gives a compelling performance. Her incarnation of the Nobel Prize winner is a sharp-tongued and icy woman who clearly has difficulties prioritizing her relationships and family over her true passion, which is her work. Pike’s Curie is dismissive of her own children, almost comically so, but that just makes it all the more tragic when she realizes a little too late in life how alone she is.

One of the most grueling scenes (and undoubtedly the one that will play during Pike’s awards season reels) is Curie, in a moment of utter despair, attempting to contact a woman she once ridiculed in order to speak to her now-deceased husband. Curie’s work was all-consuming, and once her lab partner and soulmate was gone, her sanity seemed to leave with him.

She spends the second half of the movie in-between shades of rage and depression, snapping at colleagues and her own children while simultaneously carrying out an affair in an attempt to fill the Pierre-shaped hole in her life. The way that Satrapi illustrates Curie’s maladjustment to life after Pierre is particularly affecting, and she and Pike work in tandem to create a crystal-clear image of a woman whose brilliance came at a clear cost.

While it’s a little difficult to justify such a lengthy runtime to tell a story that dips so often, Satrapi’s deft direction and a pair of mesmerizing performances from Pike and Riley elevate Radioactive beyond standard biopic Oscar-bait.

Have you seen Radioactive? What’s your favorite Rosamund Pike movie? Sound off in the comments below.