Jason Prince

See this one. But pay attention, it moves fast. 📞⏰🔫

From the first moments, we should have known it would not be an easy film. I don’t know the director, or her reputation, just walked in off the street and chose it randomly. Zero preconceptions. Over the last 2-3 years I have watched many non-Hollywood films: many many many. Italian; Scandinavian; German; Korean; Chinese and Russian, among others. This one reminded me strongly of Tarkovsky’s several sci-if movies. And High Rise, more recently, with Jeremy Irons as the architect, a must see. The mission? Go to the edge of a black hole and collect a renewable energy source for Earth. This is just a flimsy pretext for the story: it doesn’t matter what the mission is. And special effects? Bah! Not important. Tarkovsky! Check out his eight minute long sequence shot from from a car through an urban highway in Japan! Epic. Zero budget. The accent is on the human experience of space travel: a few people in close quarters; routine exchanges; cubical living; far from loved ones, hurtling through space. Add to this: they are all “criminals” (their mission is a Botany Bay jobby); with violent pasts; they don’t like each other. They are all sedated and drug addicts. The presumed captain and doctor also have dark pasts and manage the inmates with controlled access to drugs and sexual release. Obviously, something has to go wrong. And it does. The film is a masterpiece I think, if a bit derivative of Tarkovsky, and not for the faint of heart/ Hollywood crowd. Like High Rise, this is a film which can perhaps most fruitfully be mined as a metaphor or allegory for our current human predicament in post industrial OECD countries: what is the director trying to tell us about the momentum of our world? For surely, we are heading now into a black hole....