Vesper Review: A beautiful sci-fi thriller with an apocalyptic heart

Polygon will be there at Fantastic Fest 2022 to cover new horror, sci-fi, cult and action films making their way to theaters and streaming. This review was published in conjunction with the film’s Fantastic Fest premiere.

A bleak future and hopeless circumstances are so commonplace on screen that they feel like the default mode for sci-fi storytelling, especially in low-budget films. It’s hard for one scrap world or future-fascist dystopia to stand out from the rest, when so many sci-fi stories explicitly warn us that every aspect of our lives could potentially lead us into some kind of apocalypse. The indie science fiction film vespers is no exception to this rule – it takes place in a future where the earth has been rendered nearly uninhabitable and the survivors are either hiding out in glowing enclaves called citadels or living hand-to-mouth in the rubble outside the citadel walls expire. But dystopian sci-fi has rarely been as finely and beautifully detailed as Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper’s new film.

vespers simultaneously plays like an imaginative indie on a budget in the range of dual and like Alex Garland’s $50 million passion project destruction. It’s a small story, so subdued and minimalist at times that even putting two characters in the same room can feel crowded. But in her first film release since 2012 is the well-received sci-fi import Disappearing Waves, Buozyte and Samper do an impressive job of creating a plausible, tangible world around these tranquil spaces. The scenery tells the story as effectively as any laborious exhibition could.

Image: IFC Films

Labels for an opening title card vespershis ugly version of the future as “The New Dark Ages”. Faced with the collapse of the environment, mankind tried to avert the catastrophe through genetic engineering. But altered viruses and organisms escaped into the wild, taking on the role of invasive species, wiping out Earth’s original biosphere and replacing it with aggressive new life forms. The only seeds that will grow are from the Citadel labs, and are designed to produce sterile plants, requiring outsiders to trade or buy new seeds every growing season.

Determined to apply her scientific knowledge to the problem, thirteen-year-old Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) tinkers around in a dingy lab, splicing DNA to figure out how to unlock Citadel seeds or grow her own edible plants. But the project must take a backseat to survival as she tries to support herself and her paralyzed father Darius (Richard Brake) with whatever she can glean or scrounge from her deadly surroundings.

There is no timeline as to when or how this happened, but the setting shows all the signs of a world far more advanced than ours before it collapsed. Darius can’t move or speak, but a dirty plug that leads into his brain allows him to accompany Vesper on her rounds via a hovering telepresence drone, through which he constantly rants about her decisions and how much time she’s wasting, to improve their lives. Meanwhile, Darius’ silently predatory brother Jonas (Eddie Marsan) runs a rough little enclave nearby, where he’s raised a bevy of children whose blood is a valuable commodity in the Citadel’s trade.

While Vesper is his niece and barely out of puberty, he makes no secret of the fact that he wants her as a breeding animal. In a genre where evil often takes the form of killer robot armies or towering, powerful villains, Darius stands out as a deeper and more personal breed of monster, only in the proprietary, knowing way he looks at Vesper when she walks towards him comes a crisis and the boundless way he touches her, even though they both know she can’t afford to make him angry.

Then a drone from one of the citadels lands near his enclave, and Vesper finds an elf woman named Camellia (Rosy McEwen) who was wounded near the wreck. Camellia promises that if Vesper takes her and her father Elias safely to a citadel, Vesper himself will be granted entry. It’s everything Vesper wants – but of course the offer has a few big catches.

vespers‘s basic story unfolds in a manner familiar from small sci-fi movies outlook and as oversized and bombastic as Elysium. Every time a faceless group of all-powerful elites goes up against a single determined dispossessed living in their shadow, it’s pretty clear that many small hopes are built and destroyed along the way of finding a way forward, and that practically everyone other in the story is there to curry favor with these elites and stand in the way of the protagonist. vespers doesn’t do enough to differentiate its dynamic from so many other similar films; so much of its action seems inevitable that there is almost no room for surprises.

And the film as a whole often feels like a grab bag with elements from other memorable, often iconic, sci-fi films: the ailing technology, the father-and-daughter dynamics, and the intimidating alien world of outlook; the solemn intellectual and inescapable suppression of Duncan Jones’ moon; the dreary palette and the tense, exhausted despair of children of men; and more. vespers would do a comfortable double cross with any of them — or with movies like The street, The Survivoror charge.

Image: IFC Films

But what does vespers What is memorable is not the uniqueness of his ideas, but the uniqueness of how they are expressed. The awards begin with Chapman’s performance in the title role; She’s not the fierce, combative heroine of so many dystopian futures, but a headlong vigilant survivalist who, even at 13, clearly learned caution and care. Chapman and the script give Vesper a form of grit that feels unusual for this type of story. Each of her movements confirms her story as a young teenager with too much responsibility and too much freedom. Her father may disapprove of her, but there is nothing he can do to stop her from doing what she wants. She apologizes for her choices to him, but makes them without apology or remorse. She’s gentle and ironhead at the same time, and it’s an intriguing combination.

The little details about her past and the world that emanate from this performance are all the more welcome because nobody has to spell them out. The same goes for production design and world building. It’s in small details, like the improperly rendered face on Darius’ hoverdrone, which was clearly painted by a much younger Vesper who was trying to make him appear more reassuringly human. Or it’s found in intriguing mysteries, like the mysteries behind the “pilgrims,” ​​silent people who hide their faces and constantly collect inedible waste to transport to an unknown destination. No one ever bothers to explain the giant dissolving octopus-like machines scattered across the landscape – like the similar robots at Amazon stories from the loop series, they’re just part of the world’s backdrop, an apparent holdover from an earlier failed attempt to reclaim the world for a wider range of people than the few monastic survivors.

vespersAside from Chapman’s unyielding determination and Marsan’s subtle, unobtrusive menace, ,’s greatest strength is its use of special effects to populate this world with a seemingly infinite variety of ominous life. The state that Vesper finds Camellia in – with slowly moving tentacles things (Plants? Animals? Both? Neither?) opportunistically clinging to all her wounds – is both graphically terrifying and casually treated as the apparent result of someone outside falling unconscious. Everywhere Vesper goes, unsettling things twitch, throb, or gape hungrily on trees and plants. When opened by Darius, the hover drone reveals a sickeningly Cronenbergian form of biotechnology, all the bells and whistles, membranes and thick, sticky goo. Even the Citadel ships look like disturbing insectoid monstrosities.

Inevitably liked by sci-fi fans who prefer the accelerated speeds and frequent action sequences of Star Wars shows The Mandalorian and Book by Boba Fett will complain vespers is too slow and too quiet. It’s a legitimate criticism for people who have said the same thing destructionor Andrei Tarkovsky’s similar stalker before that or any other piece of science fiction that is more cerebral than physical. But for the kind of sci-fi fans who loved it moon or Kogonadas Thereafter, vespers is a rich delight: a familiar tale but told with a thousand spooky, lively, creeping grace notes.

vespers will be in theaters and on VOD on September 30th.