Aniara (2018)

Things I didn’t learn in school: in the 70s, Harry Martinson won the Nobel Price for Literature predominantly for “Aniara”, a science fiction verse epic he wrote in the 50s. So this rather late but welcome film adaptation by Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja concerns the travails of the passengers and crew of the spaceship “Aniara” that was meant to transport settlers to Mars but is knocked off course, now pointing to eternity. The story is predominantly told through the eyes of a woman we’ll only ever know as Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson), her job title as the person responsible for a half-alive room that works a bit like a more emotionally striking and individual version of Star Trek’s holodeck. Through her eyes, we witness the increasing weirdness of the now closed society of the Aniara, which slowly turns from a kind of cruise ship into an independent world full of increasingly damaged people. The captain (Arvin Kananian) – Chefone because names are weird – at first lies about the hopelessness for rescue and slowly begins to establish a quiet-ish kind of police state, though one clever enough to do little against the increasing hedonism and weird cultishness of the ship’s population. Part of the movie is the very slow love story between Mimaroben und ship officer Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro), comparing and contrasting their different reactions to the madness of their situation.

In a move that at first seems puzzling but turns out to be rather clever, Aniara is shot in a style pretty typical for contemporary arthouse naturalism. Before things become strange, this mostly emphasises how much the interior of the Aniara looks and feels like that of a mall or a holiday cruise ship, emphasising the quotidian nature of the place and its population, even if all of this is supposed to take place in the future. The further the ship moves away from home, the stranger its people and their ideas and hopes become to us, the less natural the naturalistic filmmaking approach begins to feel to the material; the filmmakers create a conscious gap between what we expect to see shot in this way, and what they are actually portraying, making things weirder by following the visual rule book of things that are the exact opposite of the weird.

Aniara balances commentary on the contemporary world too obvious to get into with the strange psychological and philosophical states its characters enter rather brilliantly. There’s a real push here to portray emotional states akin to grief and loss and depression but not quite like them anymore, turning what could be something of a space bound disaster movie visionary and strange.

Because my tastes are what they are, I can’t help but particularly enjoy whenever hints of cosmic horror pop up. Relatively early in proceedings, Mima – the not-holodock – begins spouting stranger and stranger things in a very Lovecraftian manner, infected by the unbearable grief of the humans connecting with it, until our protagonist has to shut her down violently, which does not do much for her social standing. Then there’s the final scene, which I am not going to spoil, but which is the purest expression of cosmicism (not exactly cosmic horror) I’ve seen in quite some time, or ever.

That Aniara isn’t a film meant or made for everyone, and certainly far from the kind of adventurous science fiction you can at least sell to people (and which I love, don’t get me wrong) is probably quite obvious; one might leave this bored and confused, or get sucked into it as much as I was.