Vesper: a weak script hampers an otherwise brilliantly realised sci-fi dystopia
Though its production design and art direction are both accomplished and fascinating, Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper’s dystopia is peopled with thinly written, unconvincing characters.
Though it offers a compelling preview of a future ruined by climate disaster, Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper’s dystopian sci-fi feature Vesper is more interesting for the world it builds than for the characters that inhabit it.
In this dark vision, set in the “New Dark Ages”, the Earth is a toxic wasteland, ravaged by manmade viruses and organisms originally created to insulate humanity from the effects of ecological apocalypse. The majority of humans, plants and animals are now dead, and the upper classes have retreated into walled-off citadels to avoid the squalor all around. A young teenager named Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) cares for her ailing father while separated from him, the nearby citadel’s oligarchs having left them only a drone through which to communicate.
Buozyte and Samper’s filmmaking is at its best when imagining life outside the citadels. Traversing foggy swamps and woodlands, and switching between hollowed-out husks of villages and sleek futuristic machinery fallen into ruin, Feliksas Abrukauskas’s cinematography sometimes recalls Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979). The visual effects work, led by Yann Blondel, finds an unsettling harmony between machine, flesh and fauna, while the team’s production design emphasises organic shapes and textures in architecture and vehicle alike: airships resemble mosquitos, and the landscape is punctuated by large, octopean domes becoming rusty and overgrown. Trees pulsate with unnatural life, while plant-like creatures reach out aggressively from the ground; even bandages are full of strange veins. And beyond all this, there’s the added horror of an underclass of lab-grown slaves, genetically modified for obedience and treated like machines. With their abuse coming at the hands of serfs and citadel oligarchs alike, the lines of Vesper’s class warfare are blurred.
Though the art direction impresses, and Dan Levy’s score does well to conjure a sense of foreboding and even grandeur without overplaying its hand, the characters and their dialogue feel far less lifelike than the world that surrounds them. Vesper, the axis of the script, is a thinly sketched symbol of how the citadel’s wealthy citizens have left others with so little. Even after the film’s main source of intrigue, the oligarch Camiella (Rosy McEwen), appears, the story is dragged out at glacial pace and peppered with clichés. The visual effects work can only maintain interest for so long, and while the early interactions between Vesper and Camiella bring interesting clashes of perspective and intriguing twists to the film’s hierarchical systems, it all gives way to familiar, even predictable beats. The elements of Vesper’s craft ultimately feel out of kilter, with fascinating world-building battling inert performances throughout.
► Vesper is in UK cinemas now.