Vesper

There have been many sci-fi films about dystopian futures. Vesper is another vision of a doomed world that resonates both as a rare coming-of-age story and as a distressing genre piece about class structure, class warfare, and geo-engineering. The film is set in the future, during the aftermath of an ecological catastrophic event stemmed from the ultra-wealthy that has brought the world back into “the new dark ages,” of feudalism. This visionary film, coming nearly ten years after the small sci-fi indie Vanishing Waves and shown at the Karlovy Vary International Festival, will be quite interesting to see if genre and sci-fi film buffs will gravitate to Kristina Buožytė’s  latest sci-fi film. With arresting visuals, and with some beacon of hope for humanity, the imagery in the film is certainly influenced by the aesthetics of Andre Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and Alex Garlands’s Annihilation, which was also influenced by Tarkovsky.

In many ways, Vesper shares a lot of the same sensibilities of Buožytė’s Vanishing Waves, a sci-film with European art-house aestheticism, but this time steps away from deconstructing the male gaze as it plays as a cautionary tale on our vanishing eco-system. In many ways, it shares some of the same passions as James Cameron’s Avatar and some of the same ideas as David Cronenberg’s recently released Crimes of the Future about humanity’s future circumstances if we continue to destroy the planet. Buožytė sharing her directing artistry this time with Bruno Samper, both position themselves as humanists begrudging over man’s inhumanity towards one another and the planet during the time of crisis.

The film opens with this environmentally collapsed world going through a transformation into Vesper (Raffiella Chapman), a 13-year-old girl who does everything in her power to keep her father alive. The class divide is even more brutal than in previous years, in which the oligarchs are to blame after biogenetics gone awry, which led to mutated viruses that destroyed the eco system and nearly all forms of wildlife. Plant life and forestry are also decaying as it transforms into swamp land. Any resources that are left go to the oligarchs who are protected by their own armies. The only wildlife left is bugs and snakes that resemble grotesque eels.

Vesper resides on a vacant wasteland with her ailing father, Darious (Richard Blake). Darious can’t speak due to his illness, but he can speak his mind through a hovering box drone that has its own smiley face that follows Vaper when she roams the wasteland. Vesper mostly searches for exotic insects and worms because that is the only form of protein left. Darious also needs more electricity to stay alive for his emergency equipment. Vesper finds herself reluctantly reaching out to Jonas (Eddie Marsan), the brutal leader of a small community that trades necessities like food, water, and power for blood types and sex, but Vesper remains strong and informs Jonas that she does not want to become a “breeder,” as many of the other women in underground society have.

During her walks through the forests, Vesper encounters a weak and ill Camelia (Rosy McEwen), a pale young woman who wandered off from the upper-class Citadel community. The Citadels are the wealthy hierarchies that hoard all the resources and also have built-in humanoid immunity and are property of the ultra-wealthy. Vesper ends up healing her back to health, and both young women bond and form a friendship. In one of the most memorable scenes in the film, Camelia explains to Vesper what various animals sound like, as both young women mimic wolf howls and owl hoots. Vesper admires Camelia because she’s a citadel, which is better kept, and citadels are taken care of better. Vesper even steals seeds in the hopes of using them as purchasing power to gain entry into the Citadel community for herself and Darious.

Buožytė and Samper bring some commanding characterizations of the two young women who are surrounded by rampant selfishness from both the Citadel class and the lower-class, which has been co-opted by Jonas’s agenda of control for his own benefit. The filmmakers demonstrate insights into human nature and desperation when options are limited. It’s not a completely hopeless film, though. As climate change continues to accelerate in front of our eyes during the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, which revealed the class divide even more explicitly, Vesper feels relevant in the aftermath of these crises. Despite all the cynicism, the film holds an impressive third act, where Buožytė and Samper find hope and dignity with shimmers of hope that recall some aspects of Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men with a far lower budget. While the film might get bogged down with some despair over its portrait of a bleaker future, it eventually ignites with its austere style that’s filled with its striking surreal imagery and engaging characters. The film becomes a compelling chronicle of what a doomed society looks like upon keeping our guard down for too long.