Review: Aniara Is a Resonant, Frustratingly Evasive Vision of Space Travel

Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja’s Aniara is a resonant vision of commercialized space travel, in which flying to Mars resembles a long stay in a giant airport. We’re told early on that it takes the vessel of the film’s title three weeks to reach Mars, and passengers spend that time indulging in the consumptive habits that led to Earth’s ruin: eating and shopping too much, partying, and producing vast quantities of refuse. The film’s set design offers a nastily convincing rebuke to science fiction that suggests that space travel will represent an idealized plane of higher existence which is somehow miraculously divorced from the crass society that conceived it. Like most any airport you’ve been to, Aniara is a huge, bright, shrill, crowded place almost entirely devoid of beauty—a purgatory of capitalism.

For about 30 minutes, Kagerman and Lilja acquaint the audience with the inner workings of Aniara. Captain Chefone (Arvin Kananian) is the head of the vessel, which, in the case of travel on this vast of a scale, also makes him a default politician—a leader, incidentally, who wasn’t elected. Mimaroben (Emelie Jonssson) appears to be the closest that Aniara has to a religious figure, as she regulates the passengers’ exposure to an alien entity called Mima, which resembles a solar flare as viewed through a huge television screen. People lay on their backs in a globular room aboard the vessel, while Mima accesses their memories, allowing them to re-experience their lives on a habitable Earth. Mima, then, offers people a break from the relentless sterility of Aniara—a concept that heartbreakingly resembles our own quests to transcend corporatized realms, especially as represented by yoga or by the parks and meditation spaces that companies now routinely build into their offices.

These are fascinating, if not entirely original, details; indeed, one might assume that Mima belongs to the same galaxy as the planet Solaris. But Kagerman and Lilja are interested in world-building only as a pretext for maintaining a tone of non-contemplative ennui. A fluke knocks Aniara off course, causing it to drift into space for what proves to be an endless amount of time, at which point one presumes that the film will follow a debauched narrative trajectory along the lines of Lord of the Flies or High-Rise. And while this happens to an extent, Kagerman and Lilja keep most of these events off screen.

The filmmakers also divide Aniara into chapter headings—an overused device that artists often resort to so as to avoid the work of dramatizing the transitions between plot points, otherwise known as the actual meat of drama. For one, we’re told that the passengers of Aniara will eventually have to give up conventional food and begin eating algae. This sort of adjustment sounds like a potential seed for anarchy, but then the film fast-forwards a year in time after people have grown used to the idea. Whenever a vast social shift is about to occur, Aniara jumps forward in time, these ellipses eventually revealing themselves to be evasions.

Aniara certainly communicates a sense of entrapment, as its deliberate industrialized drabness comes to stifle the audience. Once you accept the story’s governing metaphor—that our addiction to shopping will bring death and listlessness regardless of the planet or spaceship on which we pitch our tents—the film has nowhere else to go. Mimaroben, more or less Aniara’s protagonist, has no discernable personality apart from her inventiveness and love for a pilot, Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro), who’s even duller and more anonymous than she is. Chefone, who hides his blossoming authoritarianism behind feel-good platitudes, is the film’s most interesting and charismatic character, but his methods of maintaining power are dramatized only in a few anecdotal, haphazardly staged sketches.

In Aniara, an entire society is sentenced to a floating death sentence, and Kagerman and Lilja communicate no sense of chaos, struggle, or of the signs of life that might ironically crop up in a sphere where the stakes of living have been reimagined. Sometimes we see characters escaping their plights via booze and sex, but these scenes are perfunctory, evincing no curiosity into the specifics of indulgence, loneliness, and even rudimentary communication. Though it has a promising setting, Aniara is ultimately an inhuman object, fashioned by artists who wear their lack of imagination as an aesthetic badge of honor.