In This Chilling Cosmic Horror Movie, Space Is the True Monster

There isn’t a kind of media out there as utterly, unfathomably terrifying as cosmic horror. It’s a subgenre founded on the fear of the unknown, with countless creators drawing from the core tenets developed by famous authors like H.P. Lovecraft to make truly unnerving stories. Yet despite how often people try to borrow its elements to create their scary features, they often fail to really understand what makes the medium unnerving — which is why fans are so lucky to have Aniara.

Directed by Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, this science fiction film follows the inhabitants of a spaceship, thrown off-course from their destination and confronted with the growing reality that is their inevitable deaths in the cold darkness of space. Cosmic horror was built on stories of the impossible eternity that is the cosmos, with writers and filmmakers refining this concept into ideas that would drive the human mind completely mad. Too often, movies reduce this into a scary big space monster with a dash of science fiction tropes thrown in to appease a general audience. Aniara does the opposite; it uses the oblivion of space as its terror, and by utilizing that concept as its core monster, it helps viewers understand to a disturbing degree what makes cosmic horror so unnerving.

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

While Aniara devolves into an onslaught of ennui and terrible melancholy, the film begins rather hopefully, following a woman (Emelie Garbers) who is only referred to as the “Miramobe” as she and hundreds of other passengers escape a dying Earth on a spaceship set for the colonized Mars. It’s an unnerving oxymoron to watch these positive people board the luxury spaceship while their planet rots, yet the movie’s cynical tone emphasizes how these are just interstellar refugees clinging to positivity and the hopes for a future — which is what makes it that much more devastating to see them knocked off course. A piece of space debris sets the entire ship adrift with no potential of returning their arc to the red planet, with our main character and the hundreds of people who surround her quickly beginning to spiral as any hope of salvation is met with complete disappointment. This sense of doom crescendos throughout the film, with the horrific hopelessness of this plot uncomfortably worsening as they are faced with nothing but the utter oblivion that is space…which is exactly what cosmic horror is all about.

Related

From ‘Alien’ to ‘Sunshine’: 10 Terrifying But Great Space Horror Movies

Moon’s haunted.

While so many people like to borrow from writers like Lovecraft to construct their cosmic horror, too often they become stuck on the ideas of huge monsters like Cthulu and not on what these planetary beings represent. This subgenre is rooted in the fear of inconceivability, of concepts like eternity that can break a person’s mind if they spend too long in too dire of a situation thinking about them — something that the literal concept of space represents perfectly. It’s easy when grounded on Earth to view space as a wondrous expanse filled with stars, but when marooned within its darkness, knowing that there is nothing out there that could possibly save you, like the characters within Aniara? It makes you think that everything is hopeless; while the people do begin lashing out in horrific acts of violence and cult worship in the film, it constantly reiterates how little any of their actions (good and bad) matter in something as expansive as the solar system. The film uses this human despair to frame space as the infinite terror it is, marooning viewers into its looming doom so they also have to confront (and try to cope with) the fact that all of these people are going to die, thousands of miles away from home, in the dark coldness of space.

‘Aniara’ is a Hopeless Nightmare

While Aniara is a masterclass in cosmic horror, that doesn’t mean the film completely avoids the human fears that audiences are used to. Watching what these individuals begin to do to one another in the face of death is truly unnerving, with the film offering shockingly realistic portrayals of what folks do when they lose all hope (and their minds). Yet even this human conflict is a reprieve from the only truth that matters for this crew: we are in the infinite expanse of space, and nothing we do matters because we’re all going to die. It’s a devastating, harsh fact that is unfathomable for many of the people watching this movie, which is why it encapsulates what makes cosmic horror such a disturbing subgenre. The best of these narratives use this kind of destitute terror to create terrifying villains and imbue audiences with the kind of mind-breaking hopelessness our main characters experience. It forces people to try and understand things like these that no person should ever have to, creating a maddening dread that is perfectly captured in Aniara and makes it one of the best cosmic horror movies to date.

Aniara is Available to Stream on Hulu in the U.S.

WATCH ON HULU

Your changes have been saved

Aniara

Release Date

May 17, 2019

Director

Pella Kagerman
, Hugo Lilja

Cast

Emelie Garbers
, Bianca Cruzeiro
, Arvin Kananian
, Anneli Martini
, Jennie Silfverhjelm
, Emma Broomé
, Jamil Drissi
, Leon Jiber

Runtime

106 Minutes

Main Genre

Sci-Fi