Spaceship: Alienantion on a Budget.

If nothing else Spaceship is the best depiction of alienated teenagers in a good, long time. the plot is sparse, its characters are passive to the point of inertia and the design is outright bonkers. Everything about the setting is suggestive of events happening entirely in reality. Scenes take place on grimy council estates, dense woodland and army barracks. Yet the tone, dialogue and look feel like something from another planet. At first it feels frustrating as the film sacrifices any genuine story for constant flights of fancy but as Spaceship goes on it becomes clear what is going it. All this whimsy is in fact an ambitious attempt to articulate the disconnect between contemporary teens and an older, more grounded audience.

Our story nominally follows Lucidia (Alexa Davies) a disaffected and death obsessed ‘Cyber-Goth’ still reeling from the mysterious death of her mother. Her father Gabriel (Antti Reini) is an archaeologist, far more focused in digging through the past than observing the present. When Lucidia is abducted by a set of bright lights in the sky, Gabriel must connect with the weird world of her teenage friends in order to find her. His journey not only brings him face-to-face with the inherently alien nature of contemporary youth but also his past traumas. Traumas that Gabriel will have to come to terms with to find Lucidia.

It’s a testament to Reini’s talents that Gabriel is presented as a character utterly out-of-touch with almost everything, yet remains wholly sympathetic. The resignation with which he approaches Lucidia’s obvious depression and subsequent disappearance are palpable cries of desperation. Yet his demeanour begins to break the closer he gets to his daughter, endearing us as he reaches a state of lucidity. Not exactly subtle and certainly not hard to predict, but affecting.

The real star of this film though is the world it builds and the strange creatures that inhabit it. A world in which everyone is convinced they were once subject to a mass abduction. A world in which boy a disappeared to evolve into vampires. In which shadow creatures emerge from black holes and stalk teenagers dressed in neon and PVC. All of which sounds ridiculous on paper, and would feel so in a less committed film. Spaceship however gives its world such dreamlike atmosphere that you can’t help but become sucked in.

It’s not perfect like any means. Like any dreams much of it seems to go nowhere and many of Spaceship's idiosyncrasies feel superfluous. Scenes which lack thematic connection to Lucidia come and go without payoff. The films ambitions obviously far outstretch it's budget, trying to hold everything together with duct tape and string. However it runs at a brisk pace though and bombards you with the weirdness of its world frequently enough to never break the illusion.