Crew
Director/Screenplay – Jess Varley, Producers – Chris Abernathy, Eric B. Fleischman, Brad Fuller, Cameron Fuller, Photography – Dave Garbett, Music – Jacques Brautbar, Visual Effects Supervisor – Nicolaus Waetjen, Visual Effects – AB VFX (Supervisor – Chaitanya Chandratre) & King’s Ransom Media (Supervisor – Julian Kreusser), Special Effects Supervisors – Aidan Byrne & Brendan Byrne, Production Design – Alan Gilmore. Production Company – Wonder Productions/Grinder Monkey/Macpac Entertainment/Bee-Hive Productions/Vertical/Fifth Season/Wild Atlantic Pictures.
Cast
Kate Mara (Captain William Walker), Laurence Fishburne (General Sam Harris), Gabriel Luna (Mark Walker), Ivana Milicevic (Dr Michelle Aiden), Scarlett Holmes (Izzy Walker), Macy Gray (Val)
Plot
Astronaut Sam Walker returns to Earth from a NASA mission. As the capsule is opened, she is found unconscious where something has penetrated the cabin and broken into her helmet. Her father, Pentagon general William Harris, arranges one of their safe houses in remote Virginia so that Sam can recover and be monitored by doctors. As she settles into the house, Sam is spooked by seeing things in the grounds and then finds that something is triggering intruder alert lockdowns on the facility’s security systems.
The Astronaut was the feature-length film debut for Jess Varley, who is better known as an actress. Varley had previously produced and directed two of the segments of the horror anthology Phobias (2021). Judging by the quality of the cast the project has gathered, it is clear that those backing the film thought Varley had a great deal of promise.
The initial plot set-up of astronaut Kate Mara returned to Earth and finding/covering up the fact that she has an infection of seemingly alien origin goes back to 1950s films like The Quatermass Xperiment (1955) and copies of that such as First Man Into Space (1959) and The Hideous Sun Demon (1959) and occasional modern variants like The Incredible Melting Man (1977).
All of that said, Varley pushes the mutating astronaut theme to the backburner. Instead, the focus is not on the transformation aspect but something … else. Much of the film consists of Kate Mara alone at the luxurious countryside estate and a brooding sense of ‘something’ about to happen. The something appears to be triggering the security shutdown alarms. (Oddly for a hi-tech Pentagon safe house, these alarms keep going off without anybody back at central base being alerted – or at least anybody coming to investigate). What we have feels more like a Quatermass Xperiment-alike that has been told in the guise of a haunted house story where we fear every bump in the night and moving shadow, where the woman is maybe imagining what is going on. It is a Quatermass-type film that has been slowed down and drawn out in the telling.
This is okay but nothing too far from the standard and certainly nothing that gets you terribly excited beyond the technical competence of the film and its otherwise traditional handling. You kind of keep wishing that Jess Varley would get past all the brooding and fearful shadows and actually get on with the mutation and show what is lurking in the grounds. In any of the abovementioned films, all of what we have here would have been gotten over with in the first twenty or so minutes. That said, the film does arrive at an interesting reversal of expectations at the ending, even if it is one that leaves a substantial number of questions unanswered.
Trailer here