At the start of this slow-burn sci-fi, Nasa pilot Captain Sam Walker (Kate Mara) crash lands in the ocean; she is retrieved by her employer and placed in a very swanky safe house. The quarantine is standard, the location isn’t; she has her CIA honcho father (Laurence Fishburne) to thank for this unexpectedly aspirational hideout, all sleek glass and angular, impersonal interior design. Most of the film then unfolds in this luxe-but-remote location, where it’s a toss-up between what is more disturbing: Sam’s newfound ability to levitate an egg, or the things that go bump in the night and also leave residue on the floor.
The egg levitation suggests that not only is Sam possibly being menaced by external entities unknown, but she must also contend with changes to her own body. A grey bruise on her hand keeps getting worse, and she is experiencing migraines and hallucinations. What, exactly, is going on? Initially, director Jess Varley does a really fine job of setting up and starting to unravel these mysteries; she is aided by a committed cast, with Fishburne providing gravitas as Sam’s dad, Gabriel Luna doing a soulful, wounded turn as the other half of Sam’s troubled marriage, and newcomer Scarlett Holmes as the couple’s adorable daughter.
As it heads into the mid-stretch, however, pacing issues start to set in; you feel like you want the reveals to hurry up a little and give us a bit more sense of where we’re going. Humans cannot live on jump-scares alone. Moreover, the single location means you feel as if you’re in one of those movie-themed immersive experiences, where you might get chased by an xenomorph through an artfully lit set.
Heading into the final scenes, the film flips to the opposite: there is suddenly too much to process, and it feels rushed. The implications of where the plot eventually takes us are massive for the characters involved, and having spent a long time getting to know them, it feels like a bit of a sleight of hand to be whisked away into the end credits just as we’re processing it all. It’s a shame, because The Astronaut has a lot going for it, but, like the lead character in the opening scenes, it doesn’t quite stick the landing.