The sophomore feature from Mystery Guitar Man turned budding filmmaker Joe Penna is an amplification of everything that went into his first film Arctic. The main cast has been doubled, the dialogue has increased exponentially, and while the setting is ostensibly far more cramped than the vastness of the Arctic, it serves as ground zero for a survival narrative that delves even further into dissecting human instincts. The result of all this is a film so refined, it retroactively makes Arctic look like splashing around in a kiddie pool by comparison.
Set on a space mission to Mars, the three team members and the titular Stowaway provide some of the best performances of each actor’s respective careers. Toni Colette as the captain Marina, already winning points for keeping her natural accent, lets the heaviness of the plot’s circumstances weigh on her shoulders, as the person who ultimately has the final say on a scenario with very few, if any, possibilities for a positive outcome. Daniel Dae Kim as botanist David serves as the example of how much these people have to lose besides their own lives with this mission, making for plenty of quietly devastating moments. Shamier Anderson as the Stowaway is imminently likeable and gels well with everyone else in attendance, but also gets handed (almost literally) the single darkest possibility of the entire film, a feat in and of itself that he accomplishes with flying colours.
And then there’s Anna Kendrick… who basically serves as the avatar for this film’s entire approach to its characters and their innate humanity. The plot basically boils down to the mission having one too many people on board and… something needing to be done so that any of them will survive the trip, but it consistently avoids any and all selfish routes that development could take. There is no ‘villain’ in this story, other than the circumstances of the narrative itself, meaning that everyone here is put in a highly precarious position, and while they’re trying their hardest to resolve things without the loss of life, such things are easier said than done. Everyone wants this scenario to turn out as best as possible, but what qualifies as ‘best’ makes for the stuff of anxiety nightmares.
The pacing of the film adds to that effect, with Volker Bertelmann’s taut string section and editor/co-writer Ryan Morrison’s precision cutting creating a film where the tension only grows and grows as things progress. Once it gets to the third act, it enters true Safdie-style anxiety cinema, as it feels like, for every second of on-screen footage, there’s about a dozen different things that could go disastrously wrong for the characters. And because the characterisation and performances operate in the Alex Garland mode of honest and grounded empathy, the idea of any one of these characters having to die may seem necessary, but that doesn’t make the prospect any less daunting to consider.
This isn’t isolation-in-space as much as it is nervous-breakdown-in-space cinema, with a truly humanistic story built not on our capacity for selfish cruelty, but our capacity for selfless compassion. It highlights some of the better aspects of our species, with the possibility of bringing those attributes beyond our own atmosphere as the backdrop, but in a way that emphasises that doing the ‘right’ or ‘good’ thing can be infinitely harder to stomach than the alternative. It’s a grounded kind of optimism, the kind that holds true to the ‘best and brightest’ ideal, and it makes for one hell of an intense ride from start to finish.
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