Review: STOWAWAY

Three person crew heads to Mars for a science mission when they discover a fourth for bridge unconscious behind a panel. Getting the injured one out coincides with Co2 scrubber so they are now also running out of air and they are too far away to turn back. So that's months ahead of a stressing captain, humanitarian doctor, a despairing biologist (whose work is the point of the mission) and the little one in the bed who says roll over so that one falls out.

I was skeptical about this 'un as it looked like a number of other VoD originals that use a sci-fi setting for stories variously bland or try hard. But this one was recommended by a trusted source, comes with a great cast and promised a solid core of ethics and the future of Earthlings. So I clicked play.

This is a survival story in space like Gravity was but where Gravity was a great ride in 3D at IMAX I don't know if I'd bother with it in the privacy of my own living room. It's action packed and features the space-set story's baseline of the annihilation beyond the door. But it is content to do that without challenging us as well as its protagonist. Stowaway dunks our heads into a difficult question: mission or murder; suffocation or sacrifice. Are the stakes so high that there can be no question or can the ingenuity that brought these bodies into the great black sky be called upon to save them from it?

This scenario would work with competent unknowns (which might have been an idea) but here we have a rangey Toni Colette in command, a heavily controlled Daniel Day Kim at the centre of the mission, the sheer warmth and intellect of Anna Kendrick as the doctor and a deeply pressured Shamier Anderson who, like his character, has to hold his own among the better known. All that happens.

The weirdness of space travel is constant. The newcomer's shock at rising from his concussion and seeing not the world of his job out the window but a spinning starfield is palpable. It is similar to the sense vertigo I feel when I look up at tall buildings from the supposed safety of the footpath. Not only does it mean he is soon to be millions of kilometres from home but everyone else in his tiny constrained tin can world knows that he shouldn't be there.

So, this is less a hard sci-fi workout than a space procedural (there's a superb spacewalk scene that makes a lot of play about the artificial gravity) where the driving motivator is not an alien hostility but one born of mother Earth. The ending of this one might not surprise you but it will resonate deeply. A really good and deceptively modest effort.

Currently on Netflix.