Aniara

Aniara

This can be an outstanding contemporary science fiction film of high concept. We start on a dying earth, spiraling into financial ruin. A shuttle brings some lucky passengers out of Earth’s atmosphere and onto a giant spaceship called Aniara. At first, the craft appears to be a fun space floating hotel and shopping center, a nice pause before landing on Mars. But there’s one glitch: soon after setting sail through space, space debris smashes into one of the craft’s reactors. The captain must jettison the ship’s nuclear fuel supply. The ship and its passengers are now adrift until so says the ship’s captain they come across a gravitational field that will get them back on course. If that sounds fishy to you, well, your suspicions are well-founded.

Actually, “Aniara” is not entirely contemporary; it began as a Swedish epic poem in 1956 by Nobel Laureate (as of 1974) Harry Martinson; was adapted into an opera by Karl-Birger Blomdahl in 1959; was made into another movie in 1960; has inspired more than one prog-rock album.

This film is written and directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja it initially has the flavor of now, or not too far from now the central character here is woman known as MR (Emelie Jonsson), who is in charge of a special room called the Mima on Aniara that contains large color-pulsating panels which create a “Mima pillow” for each user, which is to say their own memories experienced as virtual reality (the first such image we see is of billowing aquatic plants not unlike those in an early section of Tarkovsky’s “Solaris”).

A sort of empath but also an independent iconoclastic thinker, MR (played with tireless verve by Jonsson) at first seems to roll with the punches of Aniara’s circumstance. The movie divides into chapters. At “Week Three,” folks are getting a little sweaty, though they have been told that seeking a celestial object without a rudder could take up to two years.

The ship does onboard algae manufacture so food is apparently not much of an issue even if gourmet dining might be. But then we jump to year three, and the ship has a new dance craze. Year Four is subtitled “The Cults” and climaxes with a large scale lesbian orgy in which MR is the main object, in retaliation (sort of) for her unilateral action after the Mima room began to malfunction.

All this gets pretty scary and dispiriting in a slow-motion all-gender “Lord of the Flies” kind of way. Production design by Linnéa Pettersson and Maja-Stina Åsberg is, in keeping with great European sci-fi mini tradition, more credible and interesting than that of mainstream Hollywood effort like “Passengers.” And Sophie Winqvist’s cinematography aids greatly the fly-on-various-walls tenor of direction.

What it adds up to is a bleak “in space no one can hear your silent scream of existential despair” project bracing, but tough on those looking for something more positively aspirational.

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