Although this review may be a few weeks late, if the publicity department running Stowaway’s campaign is reading this, they may find a fair share of celebratory blurbs that accompany trailers and posters in the next paragraph or so.

Brilliant. A tour de force of realistic, mesmerising, science-fiction storytelling. One of the best space-survival films since Gravity, The Martian and the Love, Death + Robots anthology segment Helping Hand. A triumph of human drama. Grabs you by the collar, and doesn’t let go — even on very slow character-building segments, where people explicate, do routine tasks, or talk about making morally conflicting decisions.

The last line is a bit off, I think. Still, this is what most of Stowaway is about. Three astronauts — a mission commander, a biologist, a medical researcher (Toni Collette, Daniel Dae Kim, Anna Kendrick), on the first day of a two-year mission to Mars find a low-tier launch support engineer (Shamier Anderson) unconscious in their craft.

Stowaway is an exceptional story of morals, humanity and the will to do what is right in desperate circumstances

Injured and frightened, the eponymous stowaway isn’t in space on purpose — he has a young sister back home — and there is no way to send him back, or for Earth to send a rescue. Their craft — christened the MTS-42 — is a marvel of engineering, capable of flying through space at incredible speeds, so no one from Earth can catch up to it in time.

There are two other problems: the stowaway isn’t trained to be in outer space… and the craft doesn’t have enough oxygen to support four people; in fact, it can just barely handle three. With four people on board, the crew will suffocate months before arriving on Mars.

Co-writer and director Joe Penna doesn’t let the story wander into cliché territory, even if the premise tilts squarely into the space-survival category (with aliens out of the picture, the biggest problem in realistic space films is survival). The dialogues — or even the arguments — between astronauts follow a strict set of protocol and composure. No one plays the bad guy/deranged lunatic in this story; with limited resources at hand, and realistic characters making realistic choices, this is a very hard — and a very engaging film — to sit through at times.

Penna has enough smarts to not shoot the film with a typical perspective either. In the opening sequence, where the crew launches into space, the camera fixes itself on Kendrick’s character, as the final countdown, and then the launch sequence initiates. The shots then cut to and fro between Kendrick, Collette and Kim, with the windows giving us a brief look into the changing atmosphere outside as the rocket rockets out of Earth.

The camera does not cut to the routine VFX coverage-shot that shows the rocket lifting off into space. The close confines of the cinematography locks us in with the crew, and their experience, making the sequence as engaging as the one in First Man, the Oscar-winning film on Neil Armstrong starring Ryan Gosling, directed by Damien Chazelle.

From the looks on their faces, the latter two appear to have gone through this before; Kendrick, on the other hand, is the newbie, and her sense of awe is at its zenith. Their expressions are enough to tell you the entire story without saying anything.

The characters’ individualities pop-up during decision-making time, and while most of the film is set in the corridors of MTS-42, there is a nail-biting climax out in the darkness of space where two characters gamble their lives in a last-ditch attempt to extend their oxygen supply.

While the ending feels like the culmination of a short-story, the film, with its sombre, funereal tone, is not your conventional space adventure. What it is though, is an exceptional story of morals, humanity and the will to do what is right in desperate circumstances.

Streaming now on Netflix, Stowaway is rated 13+, for drama and brief moments of thrill.

Published in Dawn, ICON, May 16th, 2021