A few months back, I saw the unrelentingly bleak yet still oddly beautiful 2018 science fiction film Aniara for the first time. An adaptation of an epic poem, it journeys through space with a large group of passengers fleeing an Earth decimated by climate change to find a new home that will be more habitable, only to encounter an almost banal yet still all-consuming catastrophe that threatens the ship as well as their very future. The reason it has stuck with me, beyond the strong performances and thoughtful way it was all constructed, was the unrelentingly grim core of the experience. While cinema has often had a romantic idea of space as the final frontier that can provide our salvation, here was a work that took things down a darker path more than any other I had ever seen. It’s a film that I was frequently thinking about while watching Mikael Håfström’s psychological thrillerSlingshot. Though it plays out on a much smaller scale, the moments of bleakness at all being potentially lost provides glimmers of a more substantive and sinister work of genre fare. Alas, where Aniara became rather quietly astounding and expansive, this film just gets largely lost in space.

To engage with the potential Slingshot had to succeed at what it’s going for without tipping things off too much requires a great degree of subtlety. More, in fact, than the film itself has as an exploration of a trio of characters losing their minds. Though co-written by Nathan Parker, who previously penned scripts for the similarly confined sci-fi film Moon and the haunting horror vision that is His House, it’s not nearly as flooring as those past works. Even as there is a core bleakness to it that is intriguing and made all the more effective in an ending that doesn’t blink in the face of it, it never quite makes the most of this on the way to get there. As written by Parker and R. Scott Adams, it’s a film whose greatest aspirations never completely achieve the liftoff it’s grasping for. It almost grabs you, but still loses hold.

What Is ‘Slingshot’ About?

This is all seen through the rather unreliable eyes of John (Casey Affleck) who is waking up with the galaxy’s worst hangover and is more than a little groggy. He has been essentially drugged in order to hibernate as he, along with two other crew, Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne) and Nash (Tomer Capone), are traveling on a small spacecraft to Saturn’s moon, Titan. They’ll periodically get up to make sure everything is running smoothly before going back under, but this process starts to take a toll on them. Their mission is an ostensibly simple one, gathering natural resources for use back on Earth, but nothing is simple when it comes to space travel. As John struggles to get his bearings and reflect back on hazy memories of a relationship he once had back home with the underwritten Zoe (Emily Beecham), there are brief shades of something like Steven Soderbergh’s somber take on Solaris, but it never reaches the same heights as that did. Instead, it’s a more standard thriller where there is an urgent threat to the ship, a whole heaping of paranoia, and too little else.

Where Parker’s aforementioned Moon was as much about the internal struggles with isolation and the realization of how expendable you are, Slingshot is more of a murky mystery where the big revelations don’t hold up under scrutiny. Namely, there becomes a question about how much what’s happening can be trusted. The film invites such skepticism right out of the gate as we learn that the drugs can have an extreme effect on one’s mind. While it certainly seems like John is one of the few keeping his head, especially as he begins to get caught in the middle of a brewing conflict between Franks and Nash, he’s also hallucinating things that aren’t there (namely Zoe) with increasing frequency. Even more than that, the design of the interiors of the spaceship seem almost purposely cheap so as to maybe feel like a sign something else is afoot. Though whether this was actually an intentional choice or more just a product of a genuinely low budget having to make do with what they could is anyone’s guess.

Even as all the performers are often throwing themselves into flimsy writing, the hints of a twist hang over the entire affair. Further, certain key choices only serve to lessen what could have been a more boldly bleak narrative core that it nearly kept consistent until the end. Where Aniara was about realizing that all may indeed be lost, Slingshot dangles questions in front of us that end up feeling incidental. Even the title of the film is a reference to a maneuver that, while an interesting way to generate conflict between the men on the ship about whether it’s worth it, doesn’t feel particularly important in the grand scheme of where things go.

Though It Doesn’t Make Complete Sense, ‘Slingshot’ Almost Ends on a Grim High Note
Image via Bleecker Street

With all this being said, there is something to appreciate in how the film follows through on embracing the dark oblivion that it had previously only been glimpsing into. Even as the film would often blink in the face of the full bleak potential it was persistently dancing around, the finale still almost helps it cross the finish line with something resembling more shattering fear. Tragically, you then think about it for half a second and realize that the door the story ultimately goes down doesn’t really make any sense. To say why would be a spoiler, though let’s just say if you start looking back on the way this mission was constructed, things start to look awfully shaky. That the final sequence and even the closing shot serves as one last gut punch can’t salvage how the overall more haphazard swing means it doesn’t connect as well as it could have. No matter how much it committed to the maneuvers it was throwing at us, Slingshot can’t quite hit the mark in the way it needs to and itself just drifts away.

Slingshot is in theaters in the U.S. starting August 30. Click below for showtimes near you.

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