Cryo-sleep and the deep, dark loneliness of space rarely go well together. We have loads of movies to back this up. Either a person slowly goes mad upon being awakened, or some horrible monster has managed to board the traveling ship. There are no literal monsters in Mikael Håfström’s tense, slow burn psychological thriller Slingshot, but the paranoia created by such isolation is just as deadly.
Casey Affleck plays John, part of a three-man crew aboard the Odyssey-1 spacecraft headed to Saturn’s moon, Titan. Laurence Fishburne plays commander Capt. Franks, the calm and collected leader of the years-long mission to harvest natural resources. The Boys actor Tomer Capone is Nash, a fellow astronaut.
The film’s title comes from the “slingshot” maneuver they’ll need to pull off, firing their rockets into Saturn’s gravitational pull so as not to burn up all of their fuel. It’s a risky gambit. One mistake and they’ll be floating space debris. Periodically, the men must re-enter hibernation to conserve what little they have for the long journey. The combination of such a dangerous tactic combined with the side-effects of cryo-sleep prove to be quite a challenge.
Every time John wakes up we hear the cheery ship computer voice warn, “You are emerging from deep hibernation. Please be careful. The drugs used to induce hibernation can produce mild side effects, including confusion, nausea, dizziness and disorientation.”
It’s an understatement.
Before long, John begins losing memories. He even forgets the last name of the woman he loves, Zoe (Emily Beecham), part of NASA’s ship design team. When an object suddenly strikes the ship, everything goes pear-shaped. Nash breaks from reality pretty quickly, dangerously acting against the use of the “slingshot” for fear they’ll all be killed. Things aren’t going well for John, either, who is suffering from hallucinations. The anguish of leaving behind the woman he loves compounded with everything else is written all over his haggard face.
As for Capt. Franks…well, he’s alright because he brought a flask of homemade moonshine. He’s good. Or is he?
Håfström is a Swedish filmmaker who has found success in America by being a jack of all trades. He’s capably directed a wide variety of genres including Stephen King adaptation 1408, the Clive Owen/Jennifer Aniston thriller Derailed, and the Schwarzenegger/Stallone flick Escape Plan. When Anthony Hopkins felt like playing an exorcist in The Rite, it was Håfström who got the call. But he’s never done anything quite like Slingshot before, which is more of a quiet chamber piece similar to Solaris, Ad Astra, and any number of tense deep-space films about men losing their shit in zero gravity. He manages to capture the growing anxiety and despair of the men trapped inside this vessel that is feeling smaller by the day. As it becomes tougher for them to tell what’s real and what’s a product of fractured psyches, it’s also tough for us to pinpoint the same.
At the same time, the screenplay by Nathan Parker and R. Scott Adams doesn’t do anything new. We’ve seen this story many times before, and Slingshot follows much the same trajectory. But I feel as if this particular sub-genre exists because people like the mood they create. There’s something intoxicating about the rhythmic hum of the spacecraft’s systems, creating background music for the slow drift into madness against the vast emptiness of space. For those so inclined, Slingshot is an expedition worth seeing through to the end.
Slingshot opens in theaters on August 30th.
