While this new Casey Affleck-starring work, Slingshot, is set up like a science-fiction story, in reality it’s a tense acting exercise couched in a psychological thriller. The whole thing is set aboard a spacecraft heading to Saturn’s moon, Titan, in the hopes of beginning the long and necessary process of relocating portions of earth’s population. The mission is years long, and to keep the three elite astronauts on board the craft sane, they put them in cryogenic sleep for three-month cycles, waking them to check the status of their vessel, eat, exercise, and check for any updates from back home. Affleck’s John seems especially interested in these messages from earth because he left someone behind who he’d really like to hear from, and it’s his anxiety and loneliness that fuels almost everything that happens in Slingshot.
Directed by Mikael Hafstrom (1408, The Rite, the Bloodline series), the film’s other astronauts are Nash (Tomer Capone) and commander Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne), and over the course of our time with them, tension among them visibly increases, especially after it appears part of the ship was damaged from the outside during their sleep cycle. The ship’s diagnostics don’t show any signs of major malfunctions as a result, but Nash is convinced the trouble warrants considering turning the craft around before they reach the point where they use Jupiter’s orbital pull to slingshot the craft toward its final destination. He and the captain nearly come to blows over the issue, putting John in the middle to be the de facto tiebreaker, even though the situation isn’t exactly a democracy.
To make matters worse, John is having flashbacks to his time at home leading up to his departure, including an unexpected but deeply close relationship with analyst Zoe (Emily Beecham). While the mission isn’t meant to be a suicide mission, it will keep them apart for years, something she thought she understood as they got involved, but feelings change. John also starts to see Zoe on the spacecraft, lingering silently in hallways and quiet corners. He knows she isn’t really there, but he hadn’t expected his sense of loss with regards to her to be so powerful and mess with his head to such a degree. Part of the sleep process involves a sedative, and supposedly the side effects might include hallucinations, so John is constantly checking in with the others about what they might be seeing, but he also doesn’t want to appear crazy and get sidelined for such an important deep-space mission.
I won’t say much more about where the story goes from that point, but as the film progresses, all types of doubts explode in John’s mind about every aspect of this journey. He begins to distrust his own senses, his grip on reality, and those around him; and it takes his mind to some truly unexpected and dark places that make him paranoid about whether the mission will be useful or if it is designed to test him and his abilities. All three of the main actors are fantastic, but it’s especially great to see Fishburne really dig into a character the way he does here and play him with layers that can be interpreted in a variety of ways, depending on how freaked out you’re feeling at any given moment.
Affleck is simply one of the best working today, but normally he’s more dialed back in his approach to playing characters. Not here. In Slingshot, he’s hyper-focused in one moment and an emotional wreck in the next, and he sells every side John possesses. We worry about him, regarding both his mental health and what damage he might do to himself or others. There are going to be those who simply don’t buy into the premise, but I happen to adore sad-astronaut movies. While this is no Solaris, it’s still a pretty solid, emotionally driven work, buoyed by fantastic performances and a perfectly chilly atmosphere.
The film is now playing in theaters.
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