Here’s an existential sci-fi wearing its influences and its supposed humour really heavily, as if entering some super-gravitational force field. It is adapted by screenwriter Colby Day from the absurdist Czech novel Spaceman of Bohemia and directed by Johan Renck, who has lately worked mostly on television, notably on the Chernobyl drama series. The resulting Netflix movie is a lifeless space oddity about a commercially sponsored Czech mission to the stars, whose astronaut has to repeat the ad slogans in his radio contact with Earth, always a laboured type of satire.
This Czech spaceman is quirkily and improbably sent out to the far reaches of the galaxy to investigate clouds of glowing particles hanging around from the big bang. But all those months alone in space bring him to the edge of insanity, and he begins to hallucinate that a huge spider is in the spaceship, talking therapeutically about the spaceman’s failing marriage. Or maybe the spider is real.
