The Astronaut opens with promise — not through spectacle, but through silence. Director Jess Varley sets the tone in the first few minutes with a grounded landing sequence that feels more like a quiet emergency than a triumphant return. When astronaut Sam Walker (Kate Mara) is pulled from her capsule, she’s conscious, but something about her feels fundamentally wrong. That small unease becomes the movie’s heartbeat.
This is a film built on atmosphere — paranoid, suffocating, clinically cold. Much of the story unfolds inside a high-tech safe house, a sterile sanctuary designed to rehabilitate Sam both physically and mentally. Yet as the days pass, her controlled environment becomes a psychological cage. She starts to suspect she didn’t come back alone.
A Performance Anchored in Fear and Fragility
Kate Mara carries the film almost single-handedly. Hers is not a loud performance — it’s internal, restless, made of quiet looks and uncertain breaths. Even when the script occasionally leans on familiar sci-fi horror beats, Mara keeps the character grounded in emotional truth. She plays Sam not just as someone who is afraid of something outside herself, but someone terrified of what she might be transforming into.
Laurence Fishburne and Gabriel Luna lend support, but the film isolates Mara so thoroughly that their roles feel intentionally distant — like voices on the other side of a reinforced wall. This is, for better or worse, her breakdown and hers alone.
Where The Astronaut soars is in its commitment to ambiguity. For much of the runtime, it successfully blurs the line between extraterrestrial threat and psychological trauma. There’s an eerie tranquillity in the way the film lets reality decay without warning. At its best, it feels like a thematic cousin to Under the Skin or Possessor, where the tension lives in uncertainty rather than explanation.
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However, it’s in the final act that the film begins to lose altitude. After carefully constructing a mood of existential dread, the climax shifts into more literal territory — rushing through revelations that feel hurried compared to the methodical buildup. What should land like a gut punch feels more like a procedural twist.
That said, it doesn’t entirely erase what works. The film still lingers after it ends — not because of its conclusion, but because of the emotional residue it leaves behind. It asks a question more important than “Is she being hunted?” — something closer to “How much of yourself do you lose when no one believes what you’ve brought back?”
Does The Astronaut Truly Stick the Landing?
The Astronaut isn’t flawless, but its strength lies in tone, mood and a compelling central performance. It delivers psychological unease with unsettling precision, even if it struggles to fully justify its final destination. For fans of slow-burn sci-fi horror with claustrophobic storytelling and existential undertones, this journey may be worth taking — just don’t expect a clean landing.
