Casey Affleck Stars in Serviceable Space Thriller

“In space, no one can hear you scream… your girlfriend’s name,” would be a good tagline for Slingshot, a psychological sci-fi thriller about an astronaut suffering major romantic withdrawal during a voyage to Saturn’s largest moon, Titan.

Starring Casey Affleck and directed by Mikael Håfström, the film plays at times as both an intimate, low-key riff on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, and a variation of James Gray’s Ad Astra. But it’s ultimately neither of those movies, opting for lots of narrative red herrings and plot twists instead of celestial wonders or emotional climaxes. The result feels more like a B-grade thriller that’s been elevated by a good cast and a script with some clever moves — which should help Slingshot land smoothly on streamers after a theatrical release.

Affleck stars as John, who’s part of a three-man mission on the Odyssey 1 (shoutout to Kubrick), a long-haul shuttle traveling to Titan to determine whether the moon’s ample supply of methane gas could help combat the climate crisis. If this doesn’t seem logical or even feasible, just know that Slingshot is less concerned with the reality of interstellar travel, or with what could actually be done with all that methane, than with John’s diminishing psychological state as he journeys further into the solar system.

The astronaut seems to have a major case of the deep space blues, haunted by the memories of his girlfriend, Zoe (Emily Beecham), whom he met at NASA (though it’s not called NASA here). She pops up in his dreams every time he goes into hibernation, which is basically every other scene. Affleck has never been a lively actor, and the fact that his character is a state of semi-narcolepsy for most of the movie suits his style well.

Things get quickly out of hand when John’s fellow travelers, the bossy Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne) and the jittery co-pilot Nash (Tomer Capone), begin fighting amongst themselves after the ship suffers damage during the flight. Nash is worried whether the titular “slingshot” maneuver — for an explanation of how this works, see the Nolan film — will kill them all, instead of propelling them from Jupiter to Saturn. But Franks is all about completing the mission despite the risks involved.

It’s fairly boilerplate material, and Håfström frankly seems more interested in exploring John’s memories, nightmares, visions and wavering psyche. Like in his Stephen King adaptation, 1408, about a man who goes crazy in a hotel room, the director has a knack for placing unreliable narrators in tight spaces that ultimately spell their doom. If you put aside all the space stuff, Slingshot is basically a one-set, one-character thriller that constantly tests the viewer’s belief in what’s happening.

Is John heartbroken because he left Zoe back on Earth for a multiyear trek to the far side of Saturn, or is he too emotionally withdrawn to care? Is Nash trying to sabotage the mission because he’s also completely unstable, or is he fighting to save their lives? And why is Franks suddenly brandishing a pistol to try and restore order on the ship? Even better question: Who brings a pistol onto a space shuttle?

At the start of the film, a generic female voice — that of the machine — warns John that the drugs which induce hibernation can have some side effects. From then on, the name of the game seems to be questioning if we’re actually witnessing those side effects or reality itself. By the time Slingshot moves into its third act, which throws a major and un-spoilable twist at us, we’re wondering if anything we’re seeing is really happening.

It’s enough to keep the viewer guessing until the very last shot, and even beyond that. But it’s also thin ice to stand on. If nothing is real, then why should we care if everyone on Odyssey 1 dies or not? And if Slingshot isn’t, in the end, the story of a shattered romance, what is it really about? At its best, the film manages to capture the forlornness and desperation John experiences on his long, strange trip, and Affleck does a good job conveying that tone as he keeps waking up and going to sleep, over and over.

Fishburne and Capone (a solid actor who should be in more movies) are also strong, even if their characters aren’t given ample room to exist outside John’s interior conflicts. Indeed, there’s something altogether claustrophobic about Slingshot, including a shuttle (designed by Barry Chusid, San Andreas) whose interior seems to be a scaled-down version of the one from 2001: A Space Odyssey. What’s missing, finally, is the sense of vastness and fascination such a voyage usually entails. For all the millions of miles he supposedly travels, John never gets out of his own head, and neither do we.