All astronaut movies about losing your mind in the lonely, alienating depths of space essentially harken back, more or less, to Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Solaris” in 1972 (though yes, the novel and several others covered this ground, too). The premise, adopted in dozens of films since Steven Soderbergh’s “Solaris” remake, James Gray’s “Ad Astra,” and the recent Adam Sandler vehicle “Spaceman,” is practically its own sub-genre at this point. And “Slingshot,” the new science fiction psychological thriller directed by Mikael Håfström, almost takes the narrative approach: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. However, where “Slingshot” differs from most of these movies, where the protagonist slowly becomes untethered from their grip on reality, is its sense of paranoid delusion and the spiral that it creates.
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“Slingshot” jumps around in time, in the present and the past. Casey Affleck stars as John, an astronaut on an elite, years-long mission to Jupiter’s moon, Titan, the second largest in the galaxy, to harvest its potential resources (there could be water there and more, etc.).
The film’s title is derived from the dangerous but critical move the space shuttle will take to complete the mission: a slingshot into the orbit of Jupiter’s rings that will fire the vessel closer to its target without spending all its fuel with hopefully enough for a return to Earth.
Affleck’s John is joined by only two other men on the crew, the stoic Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne) and another commander equal to John named Nash (Tomer Capone).
But things start to unravel quickly. The biggest hurdle for the whole crew is the aftereffects of the sleep hibernation they must endure. To survive the long trip and keep rations stable, the astronauts must go in and out of cryo-sleep every few months, and all of them, especially John and Nash, become very disoriented, discombobulated, and eventually erratic.
John’s obstacles are two-fold because to join this mission, he has had to leave the love of his life behind, Zoe Sanders (Emily Beecham), a brilliant NASA scientist with whom he’s been having a secret relationship. Their pact is that they can enjoy their affair, but the mission must come first, and they can never compromise it. However, as seen in various flashbacks, John has to see the evolution of their relationship; from beginning to end—when he leaves for Jupiter—they fall in love, making the whole venture more complicated.
John starts to fray mentally, hearing Zoe’s voice and even seeing her on board the ship, and Nash’s mental health plummets quickly, descending into paranoiac delusions. Captain Frank is the only one who remains seemingly unaffected by the unpredictable side effects of hibernation. Still, when John and Nash start to talk mutiny—believing they may die if they don’t turn around the ship—“Slingshot” transforms into something more of a survival thriller, with everyone struggling to keep a grip on reality and their sanity.
As suggested, “Slingshot” doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but the cast, especially Affleck and Fishburne, are compelling in their roles of a fatigued and mentally fraying astronaut and a calm but unwavering Captain hellbent on completing the mission. Beecham is a good, alluring discovery, too. While recognized for her career in U.K. TV and working with the Coen Brothers and Guy Ritchie, and a Cannes award for Best Actress (“Little Joe”), Beecham feels on the verge of a further breakthrough, which “Slingshot” surely advances.
And for all its scale—a vital space operation across the galaxy— “Slingshot” is also, interestingly enough, more of a small chamber drama about love, distrust, and mania. Håfström’s movie does a good job of hiding what feels like a smaller budget and making it a more intimate affair about a man’s sense of longing and yearning for the past crashing against his increasingly distorted perceptions of what’s real and what’s hallucination or imagined.
While “Slingshot” doesn’t break the frame of this sub-genre and maybe doesn’t quite fulfill the need for tension and suspense to sustain these kinds of movies, Håfström—known for horror thrillers like the Stephen King adaptation “1408” and the Academy Award-nominated “Evil”— thrives in claustrophobia, evocative dreams, and the latter half of the movie when everything becomes chaotic. Though it’s soundtrack choices, while on-point thematically, are a little odd and anachronistic.
Written by R. Scott Adams and Nathan Parker, while the story seems conventional in many senses, the screenwriters craft a clever loop of ideas, themes, and conversations in the movie that circle back to when Affleck’s character tries to navigate his ephemeral lucidity against the sense of confusion and psychic agony.
Overall, “Slingshot” is arguably a serviceable space thriller and nothing more. Still, its cast and haunting qualities, both in the ideas of aching love and dreadful illusion, make Håfström’s film a potentially intriguing offering for those already inclined towards the absorbing space madness genre. [B-]
“Slingshot” arrives in theaters on August 30.
