Space­ship

If Space­ship was a social net­work­ing ser­vice, it would be Live­Jour­nal. Anguished teens with chipped nail pol­ish whis­per pro­found non­sense about rain­bows and black holes, from the cen­tral­ly heat­ed, sub­ur­ban com­fort of their (parent’s) Sur­rey homes. The debut fea­ture from Alex Tay­lor is hard to watch, due least of all to its preva­lence of flu­o­ro body-paint and black­light. Forced, awk­ward and fuelled by faux-losoph­i­cal hot air, Space­ship is super­fi­cial delu­sion as film.

When ​‘goth’ girl Lucidia (Alexa Davies) is seem­ing­ly abduct­ed by aliens in a rave-mobile, her archae­ol­o­gist father Gabriel (Antti Rei­ni) becomes drawn to her beguil­ing out­sider friends. Among their edgy num­ber is spec­tral Alice (Tal­lu­lah Had­don), her name­less slave (Jack Winthrop), uni­corn-curi­ous Tegan (Lara Peak) and Lucidia’s sad boyfriend Luke (Lucian Charles Col­lier). None among them are fussed by their friend’s dis­ap­pear­ance, as alien abduc­tion has become rou­tine in Frim­ley Green, so Lucidia reveals in a monot­o­ne voiceover that only gets worse.

Such daz­zling pro­fun­di­ties dom­i­nate Taylor’s script, or else were impro­vised by the urchin cast. So dia­logue is not Spaceship’s forte. School play lines like, ​“Peo­ple are spin­ning round each oth­er in cir­cles, and occa­sion­al­ly they just col­lide,” and, ​“What I saw made me believe in some­thing… more… than this,” spill from the mouths of the babes.

Nar­ra­tive is no pri­or­i­ty either, as the plot flaps from Alice and Tegan’s drug-addled antics to an ado­les­cent vam­pire play­ing bas­ket­ball and then to a play­ground where two men in camo t‑shirts chat army deploy­ment. The clos­est Lucidia comes to per­form­ing a dra­mat­ic action is when she boils her dad’s Sony Walk­man on the stove.

A con­stant diver­gence of char­ac­ter arcs ensures nobody’s per­son­al­i­ty is devel­oped beyond a brit­tle idea of what it’s like to be ​‘dif­fer­ent’ – what­ev­er that means. To Tay­lor, it’s when a blue-haired girl puts a dog col­lar on her boyfriend to make a point about… prop­er­ty? Pow­er? The patri­archy? This film isn’t near­ly as poet­ic as its direc­tor may have hoped. For all their oth­er­world­ly wis­dom and insight, one kid still looks at a CD play­er and earnest­ly says, ​“Retro”.

Space­ship is laden thick with pro­duc­tion design. Loca­tions speak to the film’s banal res­i­den­tial set­ting, while the cos­tumes, hair and make-up ver­i­ta­bly bel­low, ​“Yes, we are all indi­vid­u­als!” Liam Iandoli’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy is flu­id and gen­tle, though puck­ered with shots that serve only to show­case such rad­i­cal props as a pink piano key­board and a Buck Rogers flask. Recur­rent slo-mo shots of teenagers run­ning are beau­ti­ful, but also pro­tract the already labo­ri­ous pace.

Meld­ing the aes­thet­ics of a Canon 5D with the mood of Glas­ton­bury LSD, Space­ship was received affa­bly by (some) fes­ti­val audi­ences at South by South­west and the BFI Lon­don Film Fes­ti­val. But its mud­dled dra­ma and tim­ber cast aren’t like­ly to land with normie audi­ences upon its wider release. It may find its tribe via VOD by laser-tar­get­ing queer cin­e­ma geeks, goths, the fetish-friend­ly and all those teens who’ve been dread­ful­ly misunderstood.