Mark Reviews Movies: VESPER

Vesper, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 29, 2022

After some text informs us that humankind has more or less ruined the planet, Vesper begins in the mud. When one sees enough post-apocalyptic movies set in overgrown cities or across a vast expanse of arid wasteland, it's nice—well, as nice as imagined visions of our planet after we have made it basically inhospitable can be—to see something a bit different.

The opening imagery of co-writers/co-directors Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper's movie suggests a world that's filthy and short on resources but, nonetheless, very much alive. Humans no longer belong here, because this new ecosystem, which is the final result of genetic testing on plants and animals and viruses, has no need for us.

The survivors of this devastation are fairly limited—at least as the movie presents this world. There's a pre-teen girl named Vesper (Raffiella Chapman), who scavenges for food—mostly worms, apparently—and species of flora and fauna on which to experiment. Her constant companion is a floating and talking drone, a metallic cube with an apathetic face painted on the front-facing side.

Its vision and speech do not belong to some artificial intelligence, though. They belong to the girl's father Darius (Richard Brake), who is confined to a bed, is aided in breathing via a respirator, and is connected to a feeding tube. He's paralyzed from the neck down. That injury resulted while serving as a soldier for the Citadel, this world's only remnants of what one might see as civilization—oligarchs living in large cities, selling genetically modified and one-use seeds to those outside a city's borders, and still creating unnatural things, including slave labor in the form of human-like "jugs," to maintain some semblance of modernity and order.

In other words, Buozyte, Samper, and co-screenwriter Brian Clark have imagined a believable, relevant world, filled with plenty of narrative and thematic promise. When it comes to fleshing out that world and story within it, though, the filmmakers come up frustratingly short. There are some impressive sights—the result of real-world locations, practical effects, and some digital technology—here, to be sure, but the things that make this post-apocalyptic world distinct aren't nearly enough to make up for the shortcomings of the movie's plot, characters, and potential ideas.

The story begins as one of survival, with Vesper trying to find enough food to nourish herself and her ailing father, while also keeping enough energy-producing bacteria to produce electricity from the generator in the little cabin she and Darius call home. Vesper also has to contend with her paternal uncle Jonas (Eddie Marsan), the leader of a nearby farming commune. He obtains seeds from the Citadel by selling the blood the community's members, whom he calls his "children"—and some of, if not all of them, must be his actual children, considering talk about "breeders."

The uncle is the main source of conflict in this story, since he wants Vesper and his brother—mainly the girl, for reasons that go back to how he maintains a population on the farm—to join the commune. It's heightened with the unexpected discovery of Camellia (Rosy McEwen), a young woman from the Citadel whose glider crashes in the forest. Vesper finds and heals her, and Camellia promises that, if Vesper helps her find her missing father, she'll arrange for the girl and Darius to be allowed inside the city.

All of this mostly makes for a simple, straightforward game of Vesper trying to keep Camellia—as well as some seeds that she stole from her uncle's farm, hoping to find the secret to unlocking them for multiple uses—hidden from Jonas, who wants the crashed glider for scrap and the occupants, perhaps, as leverage for negotiations with the Citadel. For a movie that goes to such lengths to create a convincing world, it's disappointing that such detail and big ideas don't extend to the development of this plot or these characters, whose motives are unclear (The uncle is basically a villain, and there's little to everything he says, does, or suggests except to assert that notion) or pretty simplistic (Vesper has dreams of becoming an engineer in the Citadel).

Eventually, it becomes clear that such limitations exist within the thinking behind this world, too. Take Vesper's absent mother, who left some years ago to become a wandering, junk-collecting "pilgrim." The only thing we learn about this group is that they're important enough to the course of this story to exist, and until a fairly anticlimactic revelation near the end, that's all the screenplay offers. As for the plot, it results in a series of standoffs once all the chasing and hiding have run their course.

To be fair, the movie is noteworthy in terms of its murky but imaginative visuals, the foundational aspects of this world, and the performances (Chapman is more engaged in the character than the screenplay seems to be, and Marsan makes for an eerie, understated antagonist). Vesper, though, feels more like the outline of a narrative with some worthwhile ideas, so while the envisioning of this world goes a long way, it's merely a shallow surface.

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