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.

Variety by Dennis Harvey

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.

Screen Daily by Wendy Ide

The bleak warning of this environmental parable notwithstanding, this is arresting, frequently unsettling, cinema.

The Observer (UK) by Wendy Ide

A haunting allegorical tale, Aniara warns of humanity hurtling in the wrong direction and realising too late that there is no turning back.

The Guardian by Leslie Felperin

With Aniara, the Swedish writing-directing team Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja deliver a cold, cruel, piercingly humane sci-fi parable that’s both bang on the zeitgeist and yet also unnervingly original.

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).

Movie Nation by Roger Moore

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.

RogerEbert.com by Glenn Kenny

What it all adds up to is a bleak “in space no one can hear your silent scream of existential despair” project. It’s bracing to be sure, but those looking for more positively aspirational fare will have a hard time.

Los Angeles Times by Noel Murray

It’s a grim vision, sure. But it’s a compelling one too, using the flash of a space opera to remind viewers that — whether on the ground or in the stars — we’re stuck with each other.

Boston Globe by Ty Burr

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.

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.

Slant Magazine by Chuck Bowen

The filmmakers are interested in world building only as a pretext for maintaining a tone of non-contemplative ennui.

Film Threat by Andy Howell

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 Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy

It’s a film that wants to be visionary but isn’t.