3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Vesper

2022,  Kristina Buožytė, Bruno Samper (ABCs of Death 2 - K is for Knell) -- download

This is one of those movies, no not one for The Shelf that would be rewatched over and over, but one for the other shelf, the ones that seem to be made for me. Post-Apocalyptic, Scifi, gritty and creative, full of evocative imagery where a special effects team was allowed to do as they envisioned. Oh, that may be me just emoting upon the satisfying visuals of the movie, and Buožytė & Samper may have controlled each and every image with their own vision, but it still feels like a labour of love, from either side. It reminds me of those animated shorts, the kind that distill scifi ideas and visuals into just what they need to be, extended into a feature length film.

The world has been ravaged by bio-engineering leaving it a wasteland with few edible plants, no animals and a vast garden of danger. Humanity has been reduced to have's and have-nots. Those inside the Citadels live a life of luxury and ease, while those outside barely survive, depending on time-bombed seeds (one harvest only) that the Citadels sells them.

Vesper (Raffiella Chapman, His Dark Materials) lives with her dad (Richard Blake, Barbarian), a soldier for the Citadels, left incapacitated and bed-ridden, relying on Vesper for everything and communicating via a floating drone that accompanies his daughter everywhere. She is utterly loyal to her father. Meanwhile, her uncle Jonas (Eddie Marsan, The Gentlemen) lives in a village nearby, where he harvests and sells the blood of children he raises as his own. A sky ship from the citadel crashes into the swamps; Vesper rescues one passenger, a beautiful young woman named Camellia (Rosy McEwan, The Alienist). Jonas and his sycophants find and murder the other passenger. Vesper hides Camellia from her uncle, as she sees some sort of salvation coming from the woman. Jonas just wants to use her.

The story is rather rote for these kind of movies, but the performances and the world they are interacting with is what kept me here. Marsan slides along the fine line of creepy, resourceful and ruthless, while Chapman is convincing of her high intelligence, belying her adolescence, and Blake, more often than not just a voice, gives us a man of wisdom and guidance, more compelling than the last time we saw him bed ridden (Barbarian). 

But for me, it was the world building that kept my attention. Plants have become the predators in this world, even supplanting humans as the most dangerous animals, but each carries a beauty in colour and form, and Vesper artfully navigates her world, seeing the dangers as more chore than actual danger. We see very little of the Citadels but they represent what destroyed the world, caring more for their comforts than other people, going so far as to create other people, called jugs, which they consider less than beasts, and even lower than the humans they relegate to slow death outside their walls. Of course, the remaining humans are more often than not, beastly.