https://collider.com/aniara-horror-movie/
There isn’t a kind of media out there as utterly, unfathomably terrifying as cosmic horror. It’s a subgenre founded on the fear of the unknown, with countless creators drawing from the core tenets developed by famous authors like H.P. Lovecraft to make truly unnerving stories. Yet despite how often people try to borrow its elements to create their scary features, they often fail to really understand what makes the medium unnerving — which is why fans are so lucky to have Aniara.
Directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, this science fiction film follows the inhabitants of a spaceship, thrown off-course from their destination and confronted with the growing reality that is their inevitable deaths in the cold darkness of space. Cosmic horror was built on stories of the impossible eternity that is the cosmos, with writers and filmmakers refining this concept into ideas that would drive the human mind completely mad. Too often, movies reduce this into a scary big space monster with a dash of science fiction tropes thrown in to appease a general audience. Aniara does the opposite; it uses the oblivion of space as its terror, and by utilizing that concept as its core monster, it helps viewers understand to a disturbing degree what makes cosmic horror so unnerving. (…)
I watched this a couple of years ago and it absolutely fucked me all the way up. So of course I had to show it to all my friends. A couple of them were mad at me about the existential dread it gave them. 😂 This is really a fantastic movie.
If I remember correctly, they had a screening or a premiere of this movie where you watched it from the inside of like a coffin or something like that.
Honestly, I thought the movie was… Not really horror? But maybe that’s just me, space isn’t scary because it’s entirely predictable. There’s a whole lot of nothing, and the horror from space-horror comes from the unknown and unknowable, not from… Nothing.
It’s a really sad drama about depressed people who keep going for literally nothing. It’s a great subject, but it didn’t feel like horror to me.
I was also REALLY annoyed by the shitty science behind the movie, but I watched it while I was playing a lot of Kerbal, so there was a little bias.
Highly recommend. Ran across this by chance and was completely enthralled.
