Unsafe Space

How The Astronaut is bringing the fear of alien contact home

- WORDS: MATT MAYTUM

WHILE THE ASTRONAUT - JESS Varley's first feature as a solo writer/ director - falls definitively into science fiction territory, the idea it sprang from was very much grounded in fact. "It was initially born out of an article about all of the real symptoms that astronauts experience when they come back from space," Varley tells Red Alert. "I just thought it was such an interesting idea that an astronaut can't trust themselves when they return from space because they're hallucinating, they're getting all sorts of symptoms. So I did a springboard off that."

The pitch for Varley’s sci-fi thriller takes a familiar concept but rehomes it somewhere unique. The Astronaut stars Kate Mara as Sam Walker, who’s just returned from her first space mission. After being retrieved from her landing capsule in the ocean, she’s debriefed and taken to quarantine at a safe house, under the watchful eye of her NASA superiors and her adopted dad, Laurence Fishburne’s General Mark Harris.

While Sam initially experiences some standard-issue symptoms - seeing everyday objects float as her body readjusts to Earth’s gravity - she quickly begins to fear that something extraterrestrial may have stowed away with her on the return journey, and mysterious goings-on in the house and the surrounding woods do nothing to quell her anxieties.

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