Vesper review: A gorgeous sci-fi thriller with an apocalyptic heart

Polygon will be reporting live from 2022 Fantastic Fest on horror, science-fiction, and action films. This review was published in conjunction with the film’s Fantastic Fest premiere.

Grim futures and hopeless circumstances are so common on screen that they’ve come to feel like the default mode for science fiction storytelling, particularly in low-budget movies. It’s hard for one crapsack world or future-fascist dystopia to stand out over all the others, when so many sci-fi stories expressly warn us about how every aspect of our lives could possibly lead us toward some sort of apocalypse. Indie Science Fiction movie Vesper is no exception to that rule — it takes place in a future where Earth has been rendered near-uninhabitable, and the survivors either hide in shining enclaves called Citadels or eke out hand-to-mouth lives in the wreckage outside the Citadels’ walls. But dystopian sci-fi has rarely been as delicately and beautifully detailed as Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper’s new film.

VesperYou simultaneously play the role of a thrifty shoestring-budget indie. Double and like Alex Garland’s $50 million passion project Annihilation. It’s a small-scale story, at times so hushed and minimalist that even putting two characters in the same room can feel overcrowded. But in their first movie release since 2012’s well-received sci-fi import Vanishing WavesBuozyte & Samper have done an amazing job in creating a real world from these peaceful spaces. As effectively as any laborious explanation, the scenery conveys the story.

Image: IFC Films

A title card label for the opening Vesper’s ugly version of the future as “The New Dark Ages.” Facing environmental collapse, humanity tried to stave off catastrophe through genetic engineering. But modified viruses and organisms escaped into the wild and took up the role of invasive species, wiping out Earth’s original biosphere and supplanting it with aggressive new forms of life. Only Citadel labs produce the only viable seeds. These seeds are designed to grow sterile crops so that outsiders can trade or buy new seeds each growing season.

Vesper, thirteen-years-old, is determined to use what she knows in science to solve the problem. She works hard in her lab, creating genetic code to unlock Citadel Seeds or to grow edible plants. As she attempts to provide for her and Darius, her paralyzed dad, with everything she has gleaned or found in their deadly environment, the project takes a backseat to survival.

There’s no timeline for when or how any of this happened, but the setting shows all the signs of a world that became far more advanced than ours before it collapsed. Darius can’t move or speak, but a grubby plug leading into his brain lets him accompany Vesper on her rounds via a hovering telepresence drone, through which he perpetually grumbles about her choices and how much time she wastes on trying to make their lives better. Meanwhile, Darius’ quietly predatory brother, Jonas (Eddie Marsan), runs a small, rough enclave nearby, where he’s bred a flock of children whose blood is a valuable commodity in trades with the Citadel.

Although Vesper is only his niece and has just entered puberty, Darius makes it clear that he would like to have her as his breeding stock. In a genre where evil often comes in the form of killer-robot armies or towering, powerful villainy, Darius stands out as a deeper and more personal kind of monster just in the proprietary, knowing way he looks at Vesper when she comes to him in a crisis, and the boundary-testing ways he touches her when they both know she can’t afford to make him angry.

Vesper discovers that a drone belonging to one of the Citadels has crashed-landed near his enclave. The survivors include an Elfin woman called Camellia (Rosy McNewen) who was injured near the wreckage. Camellia assures Vesper that she will grant entry if Vesper brings her and Elias to a Citadel. It’s everything Vesper wants — but naturally, the offer comes with a few major catches.

Vesper’s basic story plays out in ways familiar from sci-fi movies as small as Prospect And as extravagantly outrageous as they come Elysium. Any time a faceless group of all-powerful elites faces off against a single determined have-not living in their shadow, it’s fairly clear that there are going to be a lot of small hopes built and dashed along the road to finding some kind of path forward, and that virtually everyone else in the story is there to curry favor from those elites and stand in the protagonist’s way. Vesper doesn’t do enough to differentiate its dynamic from so many other movies like it; so much of its action seems inevitable that there’s almost no room for surprise.

The movie often feels like an amalgamation of parts from many other notable, sometimes culty Sci-Fi movies, such as the father-daughter dynamic and ramshackle technology. Prospect; the solemn intellectual and inescapable oppression of Duncan Jones’ MoonIt is the dark palette of despair and tiredness that accompanies it. Children of Men• Vesper would make a comfortable double feature with any of them — or with movies like The Road, SurvivalistYou can also call it: Cargo.

Image by IFC Films

However, what is it that makes this possible? Vesper memorable isn’t the uniqueness of its ideas, it’s the uniqueness of how they’re expressed. The distinctions start with Chapman’s performance in the title role; she isn’t the fierce, combative hero of so many dystopian-future stories, but a head-down, wary survivalist who even at 13 has clearly learned caution and care. The script and Chapman give Vesper an unusual level of grit for such a story. As a teenage girl with too many freedoms and too much responsibility, her every action acknowledges that. Her father may disapprove of her, but he can’t do anything to stop her from doing what she wants. Although she may excuse her father’s choices, she does not apologize or show any remorse. She’s meek and iron-willed at the same time, and it’s an intriguing combination.

Because no one needs to explain them, the small details of her life and world are more than welcome. This is true for world-building and production design. It’s found in little details, like the inexpertly rendered face on Darius’ hover-drone, clearly painted on by a much younger Vesper who was trying to make him seem more comfortingly human. Or it’s found in compelling mysteries, like the secrets behind the “pilgrims,” silent people who hide their faces and constantly collect inedible scraps to haul off to some unknown destination. No one ever bothers to explain the immense, disintegrating octopus-like machines scattered across the landscape — like the similar robots in Amazon’s Tales from the Loop series, they’re just part of the backdrop of the world, an obvious remnant of a former failed effort to reclaim the world for a wider range of humanity than the few cloistered survivors.

Vesper’s strongest asset, apart from Chapman’s resilient determination and Marsan’s subtle, unshowy menace, is the way special effects are used to populate that world with a seemingly infinite array of ominous life. The condition Vesper finds Camellia in — with slow-moving tentacled Things (plants? Animals? Both? Neither?) opportunistically latched on to all her wounds — is both vividly horrifying and treated offhandedly as the obvious result of someone falling unconscious outside. Unsettling creatures eat up trees and plants everywhere Vesper travels. When Darius’ hover-drone is opened, it reveals a sickeningly Cronenbergian form of bio-tech, all frills, membranes, and thick, glutinous goop. Even Citadel ships seem like disturbed insectoid monstrosities.

Sci-fi lovers who enjoy the fast-paced action sequences and revved up speeds of Star Wars will always be drawn to sci-fi. Mandalorian And The Book of Boba FettWill complain Vesper Too slow, too silent. It’s a legitimate gripe for people who said the same thing about Annihilation, or Andrei Tarkovsky’s similar Stalker before it, or any other piece of science fiction that’s more cerebral than physical. However, science fiction enthusiasts who love this kind of stuff will be happy. Moon or Kogonada’s Yang after Yang, Vesper It is an enjoyable experience: A familiar story told with thousand of creepy, lively, crawling grace notes.

VesperSeptember 30th, in theatres and via VOD