If you think about it, the sheer vastness of space, the infinity of it, can be a scary place, and several films have played on this fear. Unlike say, Gravity (2013), where Sandra Bullock eventually returns to Earth, many films suggest the possibility that their protagonists may never return, are doomed to an unknown fate, or just that they are fated to live the rest of their mortal days drifting across the cosmos. If it’s a mainstream Hollywood film, they are compelled to tack on a conventionally happy ending, like in Passengers (2016).
Sometimes, our notions of a happy ending might not match those of the filmmakers’, and in other cases, it could be argued that floating across space might be a better fate than being stuck on this fetid, crumbling planet.
It is this last scenario that feature film debutants Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja explore in the low-budget, but wonderfully realised, sci-fi drama, Aniara , that began its festival run at Toronto in 2018, and is currently getting a theatrical and streaming release around the world. The film opens in a post-apocalyptic world, where several people are being transported to the massive spaceship, Aniara, for a new life on Mars. Initially, it is all quite Titanic , with merrymaking and dancing, with a vital, modern addition — conspicuous consumption at the on-board mall. The ship also has a wondrous space called Mima, where a sentient AI transports users to a nostalgic Earth built from their memories; but this has few takers initially.
The iceberg — in the shape of space debris — hits the Aniara, and the ship is off course for at least two years, instead of three weeks of the original journey, as the blustering captain informs his terrified passengers. The Mima suddenly is extremely popular, and the operator Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson) is rushed off her feet, but finds enough time to woo her crush, Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro). Divided into chapters covering increasingly longer periods of time, we see suicides, deaths, cults, orgies, births, and murders, while the Aniara inexorably goes deeper and into space. The film is of a piece with another discussed in these pages, Clare Denis’ masterful High Life (2018), about a bunch of death-row inmates hurtling across space on a mission, while the cycle of life goes on. Similarly, Aniara ultimately is a meditation on the human condition.
While Aniara seems prescient, given the times we live in, where we continue our wilful destruction of Earth, it is actually based on an epic 1956 poem written by Swedish Nobel laureate Harry Martinson, a work that has previously spawned operas and music albums. Comparisons to the film adaptations of Solaris , where mankind attempts to engage with intelligence beyond their own, deep in space, are easy and inevitable for Aniara , but it is worth noting that Stanislaw Lem’s novel upon which the films are based, was published in 1961, five years after the poem. While it would be churlish to give away the absolutely brilliant ending of Aniara , one worthy of the country’s all-time master Ingmar Bergman, it sits tonally with the voice-over at the conclusion of John Huston’s swansong, the James Joyce adaptation The Dead (1987), written by Tony Huston. While all of it is applicable to Aniara , just one line from it will suffice: “One by one, we’re all becoming shades”.
