31 Days of Halloween: The Astronaut

2025, Jess Varley (feature debut) -- download

There is a plot point I have seen come up a few times in the last few years, one focused on women astronauts and the challenges they face, with a spotlight on being astronaut first, or mother first. There was the Noomi Rapace show Constellation, a German Netflix show called The Signal and a bit further back, the Hillary Swank Away. There's more, but there is an image, a scene I always recall, where there is guilt and pain about being dragged away from being a mother, whether it be caused by long training missions or the time away in space. Comparatively, the images of astronauts as "fathers" is always dominated by the proud stance the men take and how their sons look up to them. 

The movie begins with the splash down of Sam Walker's (Kate Mara, Fantastic Four) capsule in the ocean, its window broken, her unconscious, helmet cracked and covered in blue goo. She is taken to a secure facility in a remote location, one of those architecturally impressive houses in a dark forest that horror movies love so much, on the pretense of recovery & study. Her estranged husband (Gabriel Luna, The Last of Us) & adopted daughter meet her, but are not allowed to stay -- the tension between the couple is palpable; her mission has caused a rift. There is a brief moment where Sam talks to a fellow female astronaut and it is strongly hinted that Sam needs to hide any signs of fragility or she will be overlooked for coming missions. She has to be "strong" despite the mysterious trauma she has been through.

Its a horror movie, so almost immediately, she starts seeing things, hearing things, shadows in the background, on the perimeter of the house. And the strange bruises on her arm are spreading. Medically she seems fine, but they keep her detained for now. Things escalate, including the discovery that the house is more than it seems, being surrounded by surveillance technology. Sam's father, the Pentagon general (Laurence Fishburne, Hannibal) who runs the facility, hand-waves it away, showing her how it is as much a safe-house with lock-down capabilities as it is a house for diplomats -- typical shadowy US govt shit. Almost immediately after the house goes into lock-down, on its own, with strange electronic disturbances and shadows of creatures that we see, and not always Sam. Again, her father hand-waves it away. She doesn't mention the stalker.

In a horror movie, the narrator can be unreliable. While we see what is stalking or "haunting" her, there is always the question as to whether she is imagining the strange happenings, or is it actually happening. We also don't trust the authorities, including her father. Eventually things do escalate to full-on reveals, a Jurassic Park style scene of some creature hunting her through the hissing steam & blaring alarms of the locked-down house, all the trappings of previous horror/alien movies but with little thought as to why these are happening. Why are there random jets of steam from the ceiling? Why, if the basement of the facility is supposed to be secure, is it behind flimsy wooden doors? The creators of the movie wanted the trappings with little care for reasons, and its a disappointment.

Spoiler-age.

As the final act escalates, as Sam is stalked, we also see that the bruises have become bioluminescent goo & skin patches, that Sam is bleeding from strange wounds emerging on her body. The aliens stalking her are also bioluminescent, and we are given enough to see that Sam is maybe not quite what the movie has told us she is. The flashes she gets of a crater, and soldiers with guns chasing... something. Sam is the alien, an alien, one of many who many years ago, chose a bio-altering camouflage and became Sam as a child, who was taken by the general and raises as his daughter. Now, years later, her real family attacked the ISS and introduced an "antidote" to the camouflage. Sam is becoming who she really is. And the aliens take her away, whoosh.

Meh. Not bad, effective haunted house, stalking-stranger motifs with some decent acting. Despite my labelling as a "fan" of horror movies, there are those by-the-numbers that really do it for me, and those that just barely scratch the itch; most in fact -- a lot of chaff that needs to be brushed away for the grain of value left behind.

I am wont to mention my fondness for directors being given a chance, something to cut their Hollywood teeth on, and while this will not be the Neil Blomkamp District 9 of Varley's career, its a good start to a hard-working career. And the purple suits ("from the producers of A Quiet Place") have to keep on purple-suiting.