Vesper

Using her wits, determination, bio-hacking abilities, and more than a little luck, 13 year old Vesper and her ailing father struggle to survive after the collapse of Earth's ecosystem.

Vesper is a Lithuanian film presented in English, a bio-punk, coming of age, dystopian fairy tale of sorts that is set in "The New Dark Ages” after an ecological collapse. It's the tale of a clever young girl in an very ugly world, the kind of place that is in desperate need of the kind of hopes and dreams she harbors.

I really enjoyed this film.

The cast is strong, especially young Raffiella Chapman, who plays Vesper. The story is fairly straightforward too, but not in an overly simplistic way. It’s a tale of hope, a nice clean story about a filthy place, like a flower growing in a junkyard.

Over everything else, I was most impressed with the worldbuilding. This is a run-down, swampy, and rotting world, where everything is wet, and moldy, and rusting. It all felt left over, nothing but the dregs slowly collapsing and sinking into the fetid bog, and all of the malnourished, malformed clumps of doughy, slack-faced people who live there are very obviously the unlucky ones who are still hanging on. It all adds up to a very clear setting, with a very clear tone, and a very clear message from this not so unlikely future world to us, the audience.

A big part of the worldbuilding was the strange technology, from the massive equipment slowly going about its work in the background, to the now obviously commonplace cultural norms that are mentioned and barely glimpsed, to the myriad of strange new flora and fauna inhabiting this misty bog world. It all lent itself to the feeling that this was once a society at its peek, once a place of splendor, now gone to ruin. The corpse-soldiers' design in particular was really fantastic, as were some of the more aggressive weeds that the characters run it, and the design of both of these not only make the world seem more alien, but they also help to highlight what the late stage sickness that had helped to bring down this fallen world had looked like.

Fantastic stuff.

I particularly loved the Dad-drone, which was such a great idea for a Jiminy Cricket type character, and a perfect way to keep her bedridden father active in the story, but at the same time helpless to stop his headstrong and determined young daughter from taking risks and putting herself in danger.

Very well done. Big thumbs up from me.

Best of all, is how the film never really explains any of it, or even names most of it. The context is more than enough for us to understand, because it's all so well thought out and well done, but I really loved how it all simply exists as the reality of the characters’ world. With the way modern audiences demand so much spoon-feeding explanation and backstory for everything now, this was a bold decision.

I loved it.

All in all, Vesper is a very well done little sci-fi parable. It looks super cool, its intent is clear, its setting is relevenat to our modern (slowly dying) world, and it was all done with an obviously mid-level sci-fi film budget.

So... great stuff. Really impressive.