If you are looking for elegant and classy science fiction, then right now, Apple is the streamer to beat. Joining the likes of For All Mankind, Silo and Severance is Constellation, a predictably elegant and classy exploration of what might happen when an astronaut goes into space and doesn’t come back the same. It is part space horror, part psychological thriller, and at times, it looks stunning. However, a word of caution. It is uneven and almost stubbornly slow, and it takes all three of the episodes debuting this week to even begin to start wrangling its plot into shape.
It is a shame it is so dogged in its lack of consistency, because there is much to recommend. There are several strands to follow, across different timelines and with different characters played by the same actors, but it starts out as horror, ripped straight from the bleak midwinter. Noomi Rapace is excellent as Jo Ericsson, a Swedish astronaut who has recently returned to Earth, and who appears to have taken her daughter, Alice, away to a sinister cabin in the snow. Jo is agitated and confused, and keeps playing a recording of something, presumably a very bad something, that happened in space, much to Alice’s distress. It is all the more creepy for giving us no idea about what is supposed to be happening.
It is worth getting used to that feeling, because like Jo, the viewer is kept in a state of perpetual confusion. After the eeriness of the cabin, complete with my guaranteed fear-trigger, the creepy disembodied screams of a child, we cut to the events leading up to it. Jo is part of a team aboard the International Space Station, whose mission should be relatively routine. But during a FaceTime with her family, there is a collision, and things start to go downhill. (The prevalence of Apple products is almost funny: Jo uses an iPad to speak to Alice from space, and an Apple Watch to keep track of time during a particularly crucial activity. I’m surprised they didn’t call it the iSS.)
There are a couple of perfect jump-scares that set this up as a potential heir to Gravity. We know that Jo makes it back to Earth, or at least, we have to assume that she does, because we have seen her in the future, reconnecting with her family. But after the tight thrills of the disaster, it loosens its grip. Jonathan Banks appears as a former Nobel prize-winning physicist who has a vested interest in double-quantum symbols and states of matter that can exist only in zero gravity (me neither, sorry). But is such potentially world-altering science really worth the human cost? And what if there has been a great human cost already, and we just don’t know it yet?
Constellation has bursts of excitement, and moments of unsettling subtlety. Famously, one of the ways in which the Manson family would disturb their victims was by breaking into their houses and doing nothing but ever so slightly rearranging the furniture. Here, Jo starts to notice that things are not exactly as she remembers them: her car isn’t the same colour, and Alice is no longer fluent in Swedish. It is almost as scary as those moments in which the metaphorical monsters leap out of the darkness. It adds an Inception-esque twist, too, using Alice’s beaded necklace, which clatters against door handles when perspectives start to lurch and shift.
But again, it suffers from long lapses in energy. Clearly, the “big bureaucracies at play” regarding the future of the ISS are hiding something. The gothic standard of doppelgangers and doubles is in evidence. There are strange pills and unspoken agreements, and when Jo testifies as to what she witnessed in space, there is a growing sense that everyone would prefer if she would at least pretend that she got it wrong. It just isn’t sure whether it wants to be big, or subtle, and it doesn’t quite pull off both.
Thematically, Constellation reminds me a little of a similarly eerie work, Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield. That novel also told the story of a returning traveller, in that case from a deep-water expedition. But literary fiction is more able to linger in the murky realms of psychological anguish; television requires a little more pep in its step. Constellation gets better as it goes along and starts to reveal its secrets, but you have to really believe in its mission to let it take you all the way.
Constellation is on Apple TV+
