SPACESHIP -- Movie Review by Porfle

Those looking for a science-fiction tale should know that there may not even be a spaceship in SPACESHIP (Breaking Glass, 2016).  If there is one, it's either physical, metaphorical, or other.

That's a pretty good description of Lucidia (Alexa Davies) and her teenage circle of friends.  Some are Goths, some are just a little odd, and the rest seem normal enough, but what they all have in common is a dissatisfaction with their mundane lives and yearnings for something beyond, something more. 

For blue-haired Alice (Tallulah Rose Haddon) it's drugs and biting--she wants to taste her friends--and playfully dominating her willing boyfriend.  For Tegan (Lara Peake) it's unicorns and black holes, with a desire to be sucked into the latter and into another dimension. 

For Luke (Lucian Charles Collier), it's his love for Lucidia, which grows ever more desperate the night he sees her surrounded by brilliant flashes of light and apparently whisked away into nothingness by an unseen force while standing at the edge of the empty swimming pool where her mother's body was found many years before.

This is where Lucidia's disaffected dad Gabriel (Antti Reini), an archelogist who suffers the death of his wife by spending his days digging in the earth, must enter his daughter's world of flaky friends in search of her and try to make some sense of it all. 

Naturally, it's an instructive life experience for all involved, one which brings Gabriel back into the light even as some of Lucidia's friends venture dangerously over the edge. 

Thankfully, they aren't bad kids nor are they overly full of themselves--this isn't another tiresome downer about a lost generation.  The storyline is a free-form montage of vignettes focusing on one character or group at a time, with a constantly changing point of view.

Basically, first-time feature director Alex Taylor tells it as a series of impressions, brief snatches of story or character, and much of the dialogue is improvised. 

The camerawork is fluid and there's a dreamlike quality to much of what happens, conveying the sense that the characters aren't all that firmly anchored in the real world.  And neither are we, for that matter, as the film is more interested in conveying feeling and emotion than plot points.

The sometimes dizzying SPACESHIP gets credit for trying something different in its storytelling, although this patchwork of events and impressions doesn't start coming together until Gabriel ventures forth looking for his daughter.  His contact with Lucidia's eccentric friends and their fairytale world is life-changing, but it will yield no easy answers.

Read our original coverage HERE

SPACESHIP
Genre: Drama
Running Time: 90 Min.
Rating: NR
Language: English