In the Flesh: Aniara

How do you live when your whole world is rotting around you? It’s a question the red-hot surface of which we’ve all spent the last few years of our lives pressed up against, and it forms the dramatic core of Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja's Aniara. Trapped aboard a colony ship after an accident during a routine Earth-to-Mars transit, thousands of stricken passengers slowly adjust first to the idea of living aboard the titular starship for years, then to the realization that they’ll live and die without ever feeling natural atmosphere or sunlight again. “This is a sarcophagus,” says the unnamed astronomer (Anneli Martini) in the fifth year of their voyage. The pronouncement costs her life when the increasingly paranoid and dictatorial Captain Chefone (Arvin Kananian) executes her for fomenting discontent, but the truth of it is inescapable. The crew and passengers of the Aniara are living, fucking, dying, having babies in the airtight darkness of their tomb.

The film’s exterior CGI is shaky, but Kågerman and Lilja’s script is so strong that one soon becomes accustomed to the occasional effects failure. The bright, harsh lighting aboard the Aniara seems cheap at first, like something out of a mid-90s BBC space opera, but the first time Aniara’s directors show us a glimpse of simulated Earth it becomes apparent that the atmosphere aboard the ship is a deliberate choice. In the simulated space of the “Mima”, an artificial intelligence able to flood passengers’ minds with visions of Earth before the collapse of its climate, lighting and color snap from uniform to painterly, the glassy surface of a marsh reflecting the clear sky above as perfectly as polished silver, the golden light of afternoon falling in dust-filled shafts among the branches of ancient pines. The lighting aboard the Aniara is intended to force the viewer to experience the characters’ panicked claustrophobia, their inability to escape from the place where they know they will die.

How do you raise a child knowing no future exists? How do you lever yourself out of bed and go to a job you despise under the authority of a cruel, insecure martinet whose regime grows more oppressive by the month? Watching the film’s protagonist, the nameless Mima technician (Emelie Garbers) and her lover Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro) collapse under the pressure of inevitability is akin to watching the car ahead of you spin out on a patch of ice. Somewhere, deep in our animal brains, we sense the moment after which we can no longer cling to the illusion of choice and control. The planet is dying. A ton of steel and fiberglass is spinning toward us on a slick and unlit stretch of road. Love blows away like ashes, duty gasps its last impotent breath, and then what remains? What is there left to comfort us, to provide even a fragile shred of belief that our actions amount to anything in the face of annihilation? A little body limp in your arms. A book of poetry left floating in the void. Everything, and nothing.