Tarsem Singh's Self/less is the story of a man accustomed to acquisition who believes he can buy himself the impossible – a new life. An ailing property magnate, Damian Hale (Ben Kingsley) is facing death within a matter of months. He's a grudge-bearer, a trait we see in an early scene, in which he settles a score with a much younger rival. He lives in an uber-gilded, Euro-palatial New York apartment. He has a daughter, Claire (Michelle Dockery), who has chosen a different path with a different set of values, much to his disapproval.

When he is approached by a mysterious Dr Albright (Matthew Goode) spruiking a covert, costly procedure called "shedding", he is ready to hear more. Albright plays on his vanity, the notion that Damian still has "so much more to give". What he will get is a second life, side-stepping death.  Damian will shed his old physical self – after a carefully staged "death" –  and start afresh with a new identity, his consciousness implanted in a specially created, lab-designed body.  He is dependent on Albright's organisation to keep him supplied with pills necessary to maintain the integrity of the procedure; otherwise, his new existence is his to do with what he will. He wakes up after a procedure as a young man: Damian is now Ryan Reynolds, ready to start over. What could possibly go wrong?

Plenty, of course, beginning with the fact that he is occasionally plagued by mysterious, fleeting images he cannot decipher. There's more to shedding than he realised. Rather than going with the flow, he is determined to get to the bottom of this organisation and its process, to find the truth about his new body and its origins. In his quest for knowledge, Damian becomes close to a woman (Natalie Martinez) and her child (Jaynee-Lynne Kinchen​), a development that puts them all at risk.

Singh, who made his name with music videos, specialises in elaborate sequences that blur the distinction between dream states and reality. In 2000 he made The Cell, an overblown crime drama with Jennifer Lopez as a psychologist exploring a serial killer's creepy baroque subconscious. Most recently, he made Mirror, Mirror, a Snow White adaptation, and The Fall, the story of a friendship between a small girl and an injured man that involved fantasy sequences shot in 18 different countries.

But there are few examples of Singh's trademark visual flourishes in Self/less. It is not a mystery of identity, more a predictable thriller, with too many rote action scenes and fight sequences. One notable touch is the way the film's villains use fire to dispose of inconvenient details, torching people and objects alike.

An egotistical, acquisitive bully is offered the chance to be a better person the second time around, in a scenario that has, nevertheless, a very limited conception of growth. This is not a role that offers Reynolds the opportunity to extend himself as an actor, oscillating as it does between stunts and sentimentality.

There are a number of recent films that explore Faustian pacts, but Self/less invites a particular comparison – one that doesn't do it any favours – with John Frankenheimer's black-and-white drama Seconds (1966) in which Rock Hudson embodied the second version of an unhappy man's life. It's one of Hudson's best performances, and Frankenheimer's best films.

It's the story of a melancholy middle-aged man (John Randolph) who belatedly yearns for a different existence, and it begins with a beautiful, disturbing opening sequence of distorted fairground mirror close-ups of eyes, ears, nose, mouth, a bandaged face. It's more unnerving, touching and dazzling than anything  brought to the screen by Singh and Self/less screenwriters Alex Pastor and David Pastor. Seconds is sober and nightmarish; intimate and wide-ranging. While Self/less gives us a banal, compromised vision of the culture in which its events take place: Seconds is a scorching indictment of it.