Slingshot (2024)

3 Stars (out of 4)

Ship Scrape

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

An unsettling, cleverly effective sci-fi movie that centers on just a few characters and a single, sterile location (not counting flashbacks to Earth), Mikael Håfström's sci-fi chiller Slingshot will have your brain buzzing.

John (Casey Affleck) wakes up from hyper-sleep. He's on the Odyssey-1, traveling through deep space, bound for Saturn's moon Titan. He is accompanied by Captain Franks (Laurence Fishburne), and Nash (Tomer Capone). The drugs that are necessary for hyper-sleep seem to be causing some disorientation, however, and John keeps seeing and hearing the voice of Zoe (Emily Beecham), a woman he met just before his journey began.

Then, a panel mysteriously comes loose, although the ship's diagnostics show nothing, and neither does the video feed. Nevertheless, there is some damage to the hull. Nash begins to fear that, with the compromised hull, the ship won't be able to withstand the slingshot maneuver around Jupiter that will allow them to complete their mission. He wants to turn around and head home, and tries to get John on his side, while Captain Franks is determined to keep moving ahead. And as time goes on, it becomes harder and harder to discern what's real, and what's in their heads.

With Slingshot, Swedish-born director Håfström returns to the territory he explored in his best movie to date, 1408. That movie similarly dealt with only two major characters, and one hotel room, and everything that happens is imagination, experience, sensation; there's nothing tactile or dependable. From the moment the movie begins, a computer voice tells John that the hyper-sleep drugs can cause "confusion, nausea, dizziness, and disorientation," and we can feel that in the slightly off-kilter way Håfström uses the space.

And Affleck's sleepy performance lets us know that he's not quite connecting to everything around him. The more normal flashbacks to John and Zoe getting to know each other may seem like a distraction, but they are necessary to the movie's rhythm (they offer rest periods), and to its emotional construction. Just about every scene leaves off with at least two possibilities (was that real, or not real?), and this tension increases as things move along. Slingshot is a tightly-constructed gut-punch of a movie, sometimes ruthless, but endlessly intriguing.