“The Astronaut” is a sci-fi/horror/paranoid thriller hybrid with elements familiar to most moviegoers, whether they are connoisseurs of these genres or not. For a while, it executes those traits with enough skill and style to keep my interest. Sadly, it ultimately builds to a would-be shocking twist that is not nearly the game-changer it claims to be, leaving viewers with more questions than answers.
Kate Mara stars as Captain Sam Walker, a NASA astronaut whose first mission into space has just concluded on a nearly disastrous moment during the splashdown phase. When the emergency teams arrive to pull her out of her capsule, they discover that something has punched holes in both the craft and her space helmet that probably should have killed her.
As part of her protocol, Sam must spend the next few days in quarantine so that she can be observed for any changes to her physical or mental being. But thanks to the pull of her adoptive father, General William Harris (Laurence Fishburne), she can do it in a lavish, if inevitably isolated, modern house that seems more like the setting of a Nancy Meyers rom-com than a horror-thriller—though one the government usually reserves for diplomats and witnesses seeking protection.
Although Sam professes to everyone, from the technicians and doctors to Gen. Harris and her estranged husband (Gabriel Luna), who visits with their adorable adopted daughter Izzy (Scarlett Holmes), that everything is fine, it quickly becomes apparent that this is not the truth. She gets piercing headaches that are accompanied by ringing in her ears and fuzzy flashbacks. There is a strange gray rash on her hand that seems to be growing, and she begins to see things, like eggs floating in the air.
For a while, Sam thinks she’s cracking up, though she keeps all of it a secret because she doesn’t want to risk not being permanently grounded. However, when she starts seeing mysterious things around the house and grounds, and the security system detects something, she begins to fear that an entity may have made the return trip with her.
“The Astronaut” is not exactly teeming with originality, but for at least its first half, it is certainly watchable. As the increasingly beleaguered heroine, Mara does a good job of charting Sam as she devolves from resourcefulness to terror. While the rest of the characters are perfunctory at best (Fishburne has played this kind of role so often that he could have been almost entirely off-book even before receiving a copy of the script), the actors manage to give them some life.
Making her solo directing debut, Jess Varley (who also wrote the screenplay) does a pretty good job of selling the familiar premise. She offers a stylish, slow-burn approach that greatly benefits from the trippy sound design and the sleek locale, not to mention a couple of reasonably well-done BOO! moments here and there.
After a while, the slow burn began to sputter out, and I found myself wishing the film would get on with it and reveal the big, shocking moment it is clearly building towards. When the big swing finally arrives, however, it’s underwhelming: most viewers will probably twig to it fairly early on, making the slow advance of the narrative somewhat frustrating. And once the revelation happens, the film inexplicably decides to rush through to the finale, essentially refusing to deal in any real way with the significant implications of the revelation. This makes the whole thing feel like an exercise in pointlessness.
“The Astronaut” isn’t terrible, I suppose—the performance by Mara is solid, and Varley’s work on the directing front shows that she knows how to take familiar genre elements and present them with style and efficiency. However, these efforts are undone by a screenplay that kind of goes off the rails for a while, leading to a conclusion that fails to inspire the overwhelming emotional impact it was clearly intended to evoke in viewers.
