Aniara: The Cruise Ship Lost in Space

The genius of Aniara is that the ship is a mall. Not a corridor of grilled panels, not a bridge with a captain’s chair — an atrium with a food court, a swimming pool, a clothing outlet, sun lamps, an information desk. Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja’s 2018 debut understands something most space cinema misses: if you were transporting civilians off a dying Earth, you would not build them a warship. You would build them a P&O ferry with better shielding, because the crossing takes three weeks and people need somewhere to buy a coffee.

Then the crossing does not take three weeks. A collision with space junk forces the Aniara to dump her fuel to avoid a reactor failure, and a ship with no fuel cannot turn. She keeps going, on the vector she happened to be pointing along, out of the plane of the solar system and into nothing. The captain announces that they will use a celestial body to swing back — two years, he says, perhaps three. The chapter cards begin. Week 3. Year 1. Year 4.

That is the entire film. There is no monster, no mutiny that succeeds, no distress beacon answered. There is a large indoor shopping centre travelling in a straight line for the rest of time with several thousand people inside it.

The poem underneath

Harry Martinson published Aniara: en revy om människan i tid och rum in 1956, a cycle of 103 cantos written in the years when the hydrogen bomb had made planetary suicide a scheduling question. Martinson had been a sailor before he was a poet, and the poem’s central intuition is a seaman’s: the storm is survivable and the calm is what kills you, because the calm carries the certainty that nothing is coming, in any direction, ever. He shared the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974, an award soured by the fact that he sat in the Academy that gave it to him; he took his own life four years later. Karl-Birger Blomdahl had already turned the poem into an opera in 1959. It is one of the most adapted works of Swedish modernism, and Kågerman and Lilja’s film is the first version that has travelled.

Their central invention as adapters is the mall, and it is the thing that carries the poem’s argument into a medium the poem could not reach. Martinson’s ship is an abstraction, a vessel in a philosophical demonstration. The film makes it a specific consumer environment, so that the passengers’ collapse is measured in retail. The shops stay open for years after there is anything to buy. The algae vats keep producing. The sun lamps keep running. The staff keep wearing the uniform. The most frightening thing in the film is that persistence — the service industry still clocking on inside a coffin.

The Mima, and why it breaks first

MR (Emelie Jonsson) is the mimarobe: the custodian of a machine called the Mima. The Mima reads a person’s memories of Earth and plays them back as a total immersion — grass, water, the specific light of a summer you had and did not notice. Before the accident, MR runs a nearly empty room. Nobody wants a memory of a planet they left three days ago. After the accident, the queue goes round the deck.

Emelie Jonsson gives the film’s best performance and one of the decade’s most underrated, because she is playing an addiction dealer who believes in her product. MR approaches the Mima as a technician would, and Jonsson keeps letting the technician show — checking readouts, worrying about load, running a machine she does not fully understand and increasingly needs herself.

The Mima breaks. That is the film’s first and most important structural decision: the machine that provides consolation fails before the machine that provides oxygen. It is overloaded, and the film’s explanation for the overload is the best line of thinking in the picture. The Mima is not exhausted by demand. It is destroyed by content — by taking in, hour after hour, the memories of thousands of people who have watched their world burn, and having no capacity to refuse what it is shown. The film treats an artificial mind’s suicide as an industrial accident with a moral cause.

The lineage here is unmistakable and beautiful. Douglas Trumbull built both halves of the Mima. Silent Running gave us the ship carrying the last piece of Earth and the man who could not let it go; Brainstorm gave us the device that records an experience and plays it into another skull, and the discovery that some recordings should never be played twice. Kågerman and Lilja weld those two Trumbull films together and put the result in a shopping centre.

Craft: what a chapter card does

The film’s boldest formal move is the ellipsis. Kågerman and Lilja advance time with a plain title card and no other warning — Year 1 becomes Year 4 becomes Year 6 — and each cut lands you in a society that has reorganised itself while you were away. A cult has formed. The cult has a schism. A different cult has formed around the schism. The lighting has degraded. Somebody has cut their hair off.

This is enormously efficient and it is also the film’s argument about time. A conventional drama would show the descent, because descent is dramatic. Kågerman and Lilja show the arrivals only. You never see anyone decide to become this; you simply find them there. That is what deep time actually feels like from inside — you do not watch yourself change, you just notice one day that you have.

Sophie Winqvist Loggins photographs the interiors in a flat, even, fluorescent register that never gets more cinematic as the situation gets worse. There is no descent into expressionism, no shadows creeping in. The mall stays exactly as well lit on Year 10 as on Week 3, and the refusal to editorialise with the lights is a harder discipline than any amount of gloom.

The captain, Chefone (Arvin Kananian), is written as the film’s most useful piece of realism. He is a competent administrator who lies for defensible reasons and then keeps lying because the first lie has costs he cannot pay. Kananian plays him without a trace of villainy. He is a man doing crisis communications for the rest of his life.

The honest case against

Aniara is punishing in a way that shades, in its middle hour, towards the schematic. Once the film has established that each ellipsis will show us a worse society, the pattern becomes legible, and legible bleakness loses some of its power to hurt. The cult material is the weakest strand — anthropologically plausible, dramatically thin, and shot with a slight raised eyebrow that sits oddly against the film’s otherwise total sincerity.

Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro), the pilot who becomes MR’s partner, is written more as a condition than a character; Cruzeiro is asked to be steady and then to be broken, with little room in between. And there is a case that the film’s fidelity to Martinson is also its ceiling. The poem’s whole method is accretion — 103 cantos of the same fact from different angles — and a 106-minute film that adopts that method inherits its monotony without inheriting the compression that makes a stanza land.

It is still the most rigorous science-fiction film Sweden has produced, and it makes almost every American picture about a doomed spacecraft look like it flinched.

The real ancestor

The obvious comparisons are Tarkovsky’s Solaris, which shares the premise of a machine that serves your memories back to you until you cannot function, and Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, which shares the Scandinavian conviction that the end of the world is primarily a mood.

The closest living relative is Claire Denis’s High Life, released within months of it. Both films strap a group of people to a vessel with no return, remove every conventional source of drama, and observe what humans manufacture to fill the vacuum. Denis’s answer is the body. Kågerman and Lilja’s answer is the shop. Watch them as a double bill and you have the whole argument of European science fiction in one evening — the conviction that space is not a frontier and never was, and that a ship is only a room you cannot leave.

Aniara streams and rents in most territories with subtitles, and the subtitles are the version to take. Do not put it on to cheer yourself up.

Spoilers below

From here, the ending.

The Mima’s destruction happens early — perhaps a third of the way in — and everything after it is the film demonstrating what a species does with no anaesthetic. MR is prosecuted for it, which is one of the film’s cruellest and truest jokes: the ship holds a trial about the machine, because a trial is a thing a functioning society does, and the ship is desperate to be a functioning society.

Then the years. The cults, the pageants, the exercise, the pregnancy. MR and Isagel have a child, and the film’s few minutes of warmth are located there, and Kågerman and Lilja are not sentimentalists. Isagel kills herself and the child. The film does not stage it as a tragedy with music; it stages it as an act with an argument behind it, which is far worse, because Isagel is the most rational person on board and she has run the numbers.

The probe is the last hope and the film’s finest cruelty. Years out, something is detected and retrieved and brought aboard, and the ship organises itself around it — a genuine, physical, external object, the first evidence in decades that anything exists beyond the hull. It is a spear. A stone-tipped shaft that has been travelling for an incalculable time from an incalculable distance, carrying no message, meaning nothing, proving only that somewhere, once, something threw. It is the most eloquent object in modern science fiction and it says nothing at all.

And then the title card. Five million nine hundred and eighty-one thousand four hundred and seven years later, the Aniara reaches the constellation Lyra: a sarcophagus, on course, arriving at last, with everyone in it long since dust. Martinson’s poem ends on that number and the film has the nerve to end there too, in silence, on black. The ship gets where it was going. That is the joke. It always was going somewhere.