From 1408 and Evil director Mikael Håfström comes his latest entry into the pantheon of space horror, Slingshot. The film follows a crew of three astronauts attempting a voyage to Saturn’s moon Titan using a “slingshot” maneuver around Jupiter. However, the lead, John (Casey Affleck), begins to suffer adverse side-effects from the hibernation drugs he went under and experiences both vivid hallucinations and flashbacks. Soon enough, the entire crew loses its collective mind. Independent film producers Bleecker Street, Astral Pictures, and Bluestone Entertainment produced the film.

A Predictable Voyage

Many sci-fi and horror fans have seen the setup: the space isolation horror. Ever since Alien gave viewers the tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream,” many other directors have attempted to capture the original film’s magic. From the moment John first wakes up, the film makes it very clear that this is the template for the film.

The film’s plot essentially boils down to this: John wakes up, the crew updates each other on the state of the mission while starting to doubt one another, and John hallucinates and goes back to bed before experiencing a flashback with Zoe. Rinse and repeat for an hour. Until the last third of the film, very few moments raise the stakes or call into question what is going on.

As for the film’s romantic subplot from the flashbacks, it’s shockingly dull. Several “meet cute” moments feel less like a tragic backstory and more like a Hallmark Channel rom-com. They do not establish an interesting sci-fi world nor add gravity to their mission. 

Despite being set on the first manned journey to Saturn, the cast rarely comment on the gravity of their mission, nor do they capture the weight of such a feat for the field of astronomy as a motive. As a psychological horror, the film lacks the shock of Event Horizon, the cosmic horror of Gravity, the mystery of Alien, or even the entertaining cast of The Lighthouse. By the film’s end, audiences will be left wondering what its point was and where their billion-mile journey was headed towards. 

A Crew of Cliches  

There are three crew members aboard the ship: the lead, John (Casey Affleck), Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne), and the astronaut Nash (Tomer Capone). John is the lead protagonist and hardly provides much substance as a character. He stands out even less among his two comrades with more defined characteristics. His two defining traits are his hallucinations and his romantic subplot with his colleague Zoe (Emily Beecham) from flashbacks. While Affleck has proven himself elsewhere, he gives a disinterested, out-of-touch performance that removes much of the gravity from scenes.

Franks is the captain of the ship. Fishburne was ostensibly chosen as a veteran from the space horror Event Horizon, another story about astronauts going insane. He fits the archetype of the crazed, paranoid captain trying to assert his authority despite a pending disaster. Throughout the film, he displays many of the cliches of the “mad captain,” such as bringing a gun on a NASA spaceship and smuggling moonshine. 

The third protagonist is Nash, played by Frenchie from The Boys. His main trait is being a paranoid skeptic of the mission. As with Franks, he is similarly unprofessional for a trained NASA astronaut. Because both deuteragonists are the only ones making choices and giving opinions, the lead becomes even less compelling by comparison. Despite the three characters’ attempted development, one of the major “plot twists” near the film’s end renders most of their development moot. It makes their individual arcs feel like a waste of time. 

Given the latter’s similar lack of defining characteristics, one of the film’s weakest aspects was the subplot between John and Zoe. Overall, this film proves the dangers of too small a cast in that writers will have less to work with.