‘The Astronaut’: New Sci-Fi Horror Is Thrilling But Doesn’t Stick The Landing [SXSW 2025 Review]
Well-meaning but scattered, director Jess Varley’s The Astronaut struggles to balance its conflicting tones which makes it frustrating, rather than intriguing, to sit through. While many horror films have successfully shaded their scares and terrors with convicting and anchoring pathos, The Astronaut falters in that it tries to blend two genres that are complete polar opposites.
On the one hand, it evokes Spielberg’s Amblin movies, like E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial or Super 8, those types of sci-fi films that conjured wonder and curiosity about life beyond and found a sort of humbling comfort in humanity’s insignificance in the vastness of the cosmos. On the other end, Varley tries to tell a homecoming story with a body horror twist, showcasing how our interstellar travel can take not just a physical toll on us but also disorient our own self of stability and understanding. The Astronaut is caught between the gravitational pull of these sensibilities and never quite succeeds at either, resulting in a project that feels neither here nor there, lost in the space of ambition.
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Part of what makes Varley’s film so disappointing is that it starts with such promise; it doesn’t prepare the audience for what’s to come but thrusts them right into the midst of the action. From the start we follow a response team that’s mobilizing to attend to a disturbance in the ocean. As rescue boats converge on a target and military aircraft swoop in to support, Jacques Brautbar’s vociferous score acts almost as a war chant, as if to welcome a warrior who’s come home from battle. It’s equal parts triumphant laced with just enough dissonance to be unsettling.
We realize it’s a fitting soundtrack once it’s revealed what all these vehicles are racing toward: a crashed spacecraft that houses Captain Sam Walker (Kate Mara). Walker was returning from a mission from space when she mysteriously lost consciousness and her spacecraft went aflame. After she’s been rescued and briefly reunited with her husband, Mark (Gabriel Luna), and her daughter Izzy (Scarlett Holmes), she’s placed in a remote home where she’s subjected to a series of tests to determine whether she’s fit to return to space.
She’s eager to prove herself, and in between calls from Mark and Izzy and the occasional visit from her father, General William Harris (Laurence Fishburne), she undergoes physical and mental rehabilitation. Amid her recovery, she begins to experience hallucinations and worries that there’s an unknown force haunting her throughout the night, one that creeps too close to comfort. She suspects and worries that it’s a creature that’s followed her from space. But every time she tries to get a closer look at the house’s cameras, they mysteriously short-circuit.
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What’s outlined isn’t groundbreaking yet Varley shows considerable craft and control in playing these familiar beats of someone being hunted by a force they can’t see. She manages to create a believable and convincing reason as to why someone like Walker would subject herself to these psychological terrors. Even though Sam spirals, she is told that if she displays weakness or instability, it may jeopardize her ability to go on another mission. Her goal then becomes to downplay what she’s experiencing, no matter how harrowing, which makes for a fascinating tension as we witness the very real horrors increase in frequency and proximity.
While any normal or sane person might leave the pretty but isolating compound, Walker’s commitment is a testament to her determination and drive rather than stupidity. She’s quite aware that what she’s going through isn’t normal yet for the sake of the “next mission,” she’s willing to harbor through it alone and this mix of competence yet foolishness is what makes her such a compelling character. Mara turns in reliably impressive work here, managing to make Walker someone whose body may be riddled with fear and fatigue, yet her visage remains composed and merciless.
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It’s in these moments, when Sam doesn’t know the full extent of what’s haunting her, that Varley shows her knack for directing and staging nail-biting and nerve-shredding sequences (I’d love to see her tackle a haunted house-type film next or something in the Alien universe). Varley and cinematographer Dave Garbett have a command of ambiance and spatial awareness as they show Walker moving around the house doing her quotidian rhythms. When The Astronaut shifts from a potential alien abduction film to a home invasion one, they’ve laid the groundwork for some frightening scares.
What’s above is promising but where the film self-combusts is when Varley reveals what’s haunting Walker. It offers clarity but not satisfaction; we begin to understand why Walker had hallucinations and the knowledge recontextualizes some of the benevolence shown to her by other NASA and military characters prior. This is where The Astronaut shifts to a more Amblin-inspired palette, and the tone feels jarring with the well-constructed pressure and dread Varley and her team had taken us down on the way prior. It may be harsh to judge a film negatively when a majority of it is well constructed, but as anyone who has gone to space (or nowadays, even flown an airplane) may tell you: lift-off is important, but it’s all about how you land.
Summary
‘The Astronaut’ is certainly thrilling but ultimately it gets lost in the space of ambition.
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