Vesper gives the apocalypse a pretty face and an ugly heart

polygon.com:

Polygon is on the ground at the 2022 Fantastic Fest, reporting on new horror, sci-fi, cult, and action movies making their way to theaters and streaming. This review was published in conjunction with the film’s Fantastic Fest premiere.

Grim futures and hopeless circumstances are so common on screen that they’ve come to feel like the default mode for science fiction storytelling, particularly in low-budget movies. It’s hard for one crapsack world or future-fascist dystopia to stand out over all the others, when so many sci-fi stories expressly warn us about how every aspect of our lives could possibly lead us toward some sort of apocalypse. The indie science fiction movie Vesper is no exception to that rule — it takes place in a future where Earth has been rendered near-uninhabitable, and the survivors either hide in shining enclaves called Citadels or eke out hand-to-mouth lives in the wreckage outside the Citadels’ walls. But dystopian sci-fi has rarely been as delicately and beautifully detailed as Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper’s new film.

Vesper simultaneously plays like a resourceful shoestring-budget indie in the realm of Dual and like Alex Garland’s $50 million passion project Annihilation. It’s a small-scale story, at times so hushed and minimalist that even putting two characters in the same room can feel overcrowded. But in their first movie release since 2012’s well-received sci-fi import Vanishing Waves, Buozyte and Samper do an impressive job of creating a plausible, tangible world around these quiet spaces. The scenery tells the story as effectively as any laborious exposition could.

An opening title card labels Vesper’s ugly version of the future as “The New Dark Ages.” Facing environmental collapse,