Netflix

Jakub Procházka (Sandler) is six months into a space mission sent to investigate the Chopra Cloud. He is slowly going mad. He is in the process of losing his marriage. He is not alone.

The least likely Adam Sandler project you could imagine, this adaptation of Jaroslav Kalfař’s award finalist novel puts everything good about the book onscreen and removes a good chunk of what wouldn’t work. The original saw Jakub hiring someone to spy on his wife, and steered far more into the idea of him being the son of a party collaborator at the worst possible time to be that. Screenplay writer Colby Day, sensibly, has excised that and chosen instead to dive even further into the alienation Jakub feels. Sandler’s unlikely position as leading man, Jakub’s uneasy position as a Czech and a trauma survivor in the most square-jawed of professions and the commercial needs of the mission all collide to fill his clanking capsule with neuroses. It’s a movie thin on laughs but Sandler, faced with first contact, eyes wide with terror, performing an advertising jingle so he can disinfect the ship is very funny.

The movie’s gentle, sad sense of humour is sharpened even further by the two leads. Sandler’s exhausted Jakub is desperate to cling to the story of his job, while Paul Dano’s polite spider is just happy to not be alone anymore. Hanuš is a terrifying presence at first, a huge spider whose presence in every scene is sure to set arachnophobes bolting for the door. But Dano is so gentle and precise in the role that after a while you see past his species. Like Jakub he’s a traveller. Unlike Jakub, he’s prepared to help others.

That’s the core of the movie; Jakub getting over himself and, crucially, forgiving himself. It’s work Sandler and Dano excel at and these two gentle, cautious, broken explorers are surprisingly nice to spend time with. Director Johan Renck and cinematographer Jakob Ihre flood the frame with sensation, whether it’s the clanking of the ship or the verdant green of the river Jakub cannot quite stop thinking about.

All of this works and the movie can, and I’d argue should, be read as a dissection of the myth of the square jawed astronaut. The downside to doing that work, even when you do it well, is that every female character is rendered into little more than a support structure for the male ones. Yet again, that’s what we see here with Carey Mulligan given very little to do other than be a distinctly grumpy beacon as Lenka, Jakub’s wife. She’s not alone either. The movie also features Isabella Rossellini as Tuma, Jakub’s commanding officer and Lena Olin, as Zdenka, Lenka’s mother. All three do good work, because all three are incredibly talented, but none of them get anything to do aside from worrying about Jakub. Here, at least, it’s in context. But given this is, so often, what every female character in genre has to put up with, it’s exhausting.

If you can deal with that, and with spiders, then there is a lot to enjoy here.

Verdict: It’s a slow, precise, melancholically funny movie and I really liked it. But in exploring the limits of the genre, it never exceeds them. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart