✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
Sweden, Denmark · 2019
Rated R · 1h 46m
Director Pella Kågerman, Hugo Lilja
Starring Emelie Jonsson, Arvin Kananian, Bianca Cruzeiro, Anneli Martini
Genre Drama, Science Fiction
Please login to add films to your watchlist.
With Earth no longer inhabitable, the human race begins to leave the planet for a new home on Mars. One of the departing vessels, Aniara, is damaged beyond repair shortly after takeoff. With Aniara knocked off-course and drifting powerlessly out of control, the crew and passengers must wrestle with their fate's reality.
ANIARA has plenty going for it — a great concept, a coherent tone, an uncompromising vision, and an ending that’s the ballsiest thing I’ve seen since AI. Sadly these virtues are undercut by some unforgivable sins — it is boring, has underdeveloped characters, and has a childlike understanding of the scientific concepts supposedly undergirding the plot. One of those could be forgivable, but all together they spell doom.
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Barry Hertz
Yet while last month’s Claire Denis drama "High Life" will go down as one of the year’s ultimate masterpieces, the Swedish soul-crusher Aniara will likely be remembered as an ambitious if ultimately weaker curiosity: the "Antz" to Denis’s "A Bug’s Life" (a sentence I never thought I’d be able to employ, but here we are).
The filmmakers are interested in world building only as a pretext for maintaining a tone of non-contemplative ennui.
This tale of a spaceship stuck wandering the cosmos after being forced off course is both impressive in its scope and intimate in its portrait of human nature under long-term duress.
San Francisco Chronicle by G. Allen Johnson
Aniara has an intriguing premise, and it’s even fascinating at times, but despite an excellent production design, it never gets off the ground even as it speeds through the cosmos. The characters are not fully formed, so we’re not invested in their futures.
The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak
Kågerman and Lilja bring Martinson’s poem to cinemas with a stark beauty both in its sci-fi production design and emotionally wrought performances.
Aniara is science fiction cinema from the land of Bergman and Strindberg — sharply observed, just brittle enough to fend of sentiment, bleak when bleak is what is called for.
The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy
It’s a film that wants to be visionary but isn’t.
Parts of the film aren’t pretty because people don’t always act in pretty ways, and the speculation that such an event might create its own hermetically sealed reality, one increasingly distorted to our eyes, is intriguing, if not especially deep. It all plays out like a “Big Brother” reality show with 5,000 participants and no Big Brother.
The bleak warning of this environmental parable notwithstanding, this is arresting, frequently unsettling, cinema.
Every moment matters.
An angel falls. A warrior rises.
Make a killing. Make a living.
A poor family lies and schemes their way into the employ of a wealthy household — successfully, but with great consequences.
Holmes... Enola Holmes
A cruise for the ultra-wealthy goes awry when the ship sinks, leaving the survivors stranded on a desert island.
Spider-Man faces a crisis from across the multiverse.
A cold and mysterious security guard working at a cash truck company unleashes his own skills to settle a score.
After a soldier’s wife is killed, he begins to suspect foul play and embarks on a quest for revenge.