After pandemics, wars, and climate change, humanity fled into space to find a better place to live. However, the atmosphere on the new planet has rendered people sterile. With the future of the species at stake, a group of explorers returns to Earth to see if it’s habitable again — only to find it already occupied by a not-so-friendly community of survivors. Tides (The Colony) is an independent sci-fi movie that, despite its modest budget, offers a thought-provoking reflection on the planet’s potential future and on humanity itself.
Claire Denis (Let the Sunshine In) is one of the most interesting contemporary filmmakers. Her work usually leans toward intimate drama, but here it meets science fiction. She uses the vastness of space to explore the vastness of her characters’ inner worlds. In High Life, Monte (Robert Pattinson) and his daughter Willow (Jessie Ross) are the last survivors on a spacecraft headed into a black hole. They are part of a mission composed of death-row inmates who accepted a one-way journey in exchange for their sentences. Facing death and themselves in space — that’s what High Life is all about.
Artificial intelligence is a recurring theme in sci-fi, but the most interesting aspect lies in how it’s explored. In I'm Your Man, a woman seeking funding for expensive research has no choice but to enter a very special study. She is assigned a humanoid android specifically calibrated to fit her needs and personality — designed to make her happy. A story that explores different types of love: the kind you build with another person, and the kind you might create for yourself. It presents fascinating dilemmas in a world already populated with smart assistants built to meet our needs.
The lives of a celebrated musician and an ambitious astrophysicist intersect after both suffer a tragedy — just as a duplicate of Earth appears in our galaxy. Independent cinema and science fiction often merge to extract the most powerful stories with limited budgets. Another Earth is an intimate film that uses the appearance of a mirror planet to explore parallel universes and themes of redemption and second chances.
Clearly influenced by his father David Cronenberg (The Fly), debut filmmaker Brandon Cronenberg creates a film heavily focused on body horror. In Possessor, a secret agent uses brain implants to control other people’s minds and bodies. This tech is used to force corporate executives to commit crimes and murders. But things go off-track when the agent becomes trapped inside one of the bodies. Possessor is a psychological thriller about fractured identities and being stuck in a body that isn’t your own — a disturbing and gripping exploration of self and flesh.