SXSW Review: ‘The Astronaut’ is an Unnerving Story of Isolation with a Solid Kate Mara

Few people relative to the population of the planet Earth will have the opportunity to travel to outer space. It’s surely impossible to describe the feeling, though many books, films, and television series have posited their own theories over the years. The Astronaut follows one woman who returns from a mission and is put up in a large, fully stocked house where she comes to believe that she is not alone, forcing her very science-oriented mind to consider the possibility that aliens may be in fact be real.

Captain Sam Walker (Kate Mara) is the protagonist of this film, and she gets most of its screen time, which is largely spent in isolation as she looks out each night at questionable sights that then seem to come closer. Her reentry process into Earth’s atmosphere was not smooth, with a drop in communication resulting in her being found in the middle of the ocean with an unexplained hole in her capsule. She has bruises all over her body and keeps discovering new injuries in between regular morning medical evaluations ahead of her next planned mission. Each night, she thinks she hears and sees something and heads outside to see what’s lurking out there and may have followed her back both from up in space and into the house.

This film is a stressful watch since Sam is someone who doesn’t run from danger but instead inches closer to investigate it. Despite offers from her adoptive father (Laurence Fishburne) to stay somewhere that might be less isolating, she’s determined to stick it out and can’t turn off the curiosity that drives her. There’s considerable added suspense built from the fact that Sam never responds by shrinking away and trying to hide from something unknown and potentially frightening, armed with only a flashlight to combat whatever lurks in the distance or might even already be with her inside the house.

In her first solo feature film, writer-director Jess Varley crafts something that feels like a big-budget production on a limited independent budget. The luxurious nature of the house – filled with a vast array of kitchen items but so eerily sparse – is complemented by the vastness of the woods around it. Filmed in Ireland, it’s meant to stand in for Virginia in the area surrounding Washington, DC, a safe place allegedly for diplomats to stay that’s close enough to their governmental business but still hidden and distant from even their nearest neighbors. With no one around for miles, the notion of having an alien being roaming around feels all the more chilling, and this film leans into that quiet and sometimes terrifying sense of dread that Sam seems to invite, even if she doesn’t know what she’ll find and has no expectation that it would be friendly. 

The suspense is heightened by deliberate cinematography choices, like having the camera stay on Sam’s shoes as she follows the trail of mysterious footprints left on the floor the first night that she believes an intruder has entered the home. It’s an unnerving experience that also includes certain subtle shots of things moving in the background that audiences might easily miss if they’re not paying close attention, but Sam remains in the foreground of each shot since the purpose is to remain fixated on her and the way in which she navigates this difficult reintegration without anyone else around her and surrounded instead by eerie sounds and unexplained lights and movements in the distance.

Because she’s on screen – often by herself – for the majority of this film, the burden falls to Mara to get audiences invested in her journey. She commits fully, embracing the elements of body horror that remain constant throughout the film and conveying the intensity of the rigorous physical fitness regimen she’s expected to maintain while she’s still getting used to this new environment. While she’s not immune to fear, the resilience she displays even in legitimately scary moments is formidable and makes her a very watchable lead character. Fishburne delivers as expected, and Gabriel Luna and newcomer Scarlett Holmes add some human connection as Sam’s husband and daughter, who are eager to see her but don’t get to spend nearly as much time with her as they’d like during this period of transition. As it reaches its conclusion, this film takes some decidedly big plot swings that shift its tone considerably and will work better for some viewers than others. Regardless of how its ending hits, this film is an involving if undeniably stressful experience from start to finish, putting a moody twist on the return-from-space genre.

Movie Rating: 7/10