Everything in this film is alive, organic, slippery, has tentacles and feelers. But what is alive is not necessarily beautiful. This ubiquitous organicity created by Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper in “Vesper” is the result of a failed experiment. Mankind tried to save their planet with genetic engineering. But she was clumsy at it.
Not much grows by itself in this muddy grey-brown eternal November. The girl Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) picks ugly tubers from a field, then hops along a path to her house. Not because she’s happy, there’s no reason for that, but because worms are snapping at her feet between the cobblestones. Her father is ill, lying in bed, hooked up to dingy equipment that pumps something like an artificial lung. He can still accompany her on her forays through the woods: his spirit controls a drone that hovers next to Vesper and grumpily comments on everything she sees. The girl has drawn a smiling face on her case.
On the one hand, “Vesper” meets the expectations of the dystopian genre with this dreary landscape of hopelessness and destruction. But the images that the directing duo invent for it are extraordinary and really new. Film viewers associate genetic engineering with the aesthetics of germ-free laboratories. Not the dirty vials and tubes in Vesper’s nursery. The girl is a highly gifted autodidact bio hacking. She changes seeds and uses them to grow plants in an abandoned greenhouse that have the fragile beauty we see in deep-sea documentaries. They sway their transparent heads in the night wind and let each other glow.
Vesper hopes that her abilities will eventually give her access to the “Citadels”: high-tech metropolises that glow in the distance, protected by massive soap bubbles. This is where the rich live, cut off from the dirt of the rest of the world. They buy blood drawn from their children from the sleazeballs outside, probably to keep themselves young. When Vesper finds an injured young woman from the citadel (Rosy McEwen) in the woods, she hopes to escape to a better life.
It goes without saying that this vision seems more realistic today with every climate change scare, with every crazy story about the visions of the multi-billionaires. The elites in their bubbles control the poor through the seeds they sell them dearly. It brings only one crop, then it becomes barren and farmers have to buy new seeds. The very real modern-day seed company Monsanto has long had a patent for something like this, but has so far vowed not to use it. The world of this film has long since been created in our own. “Vespers” belongs to a subgenre of science fiction that is related to other, larger films such as “Interstellar”, “avatar” and “downsizing”has been gaining momentum for some time: the eco-dystopia.
What Buozyte and Samper do with their European and therefore inevitably smaller budget is remarkable. They use computer effects sparingly, but when they do, they’re absolutely convincing. A certain inconsistency in tone – a few scenes are out of the ordinary in their brutality – can be forgiven for the film because it is so full of rampant visual imagination. The hope that he releases into the evening wind at the end is for a world that is dying right before our eyes.
Vespers Chronicles, B/F/Lithuania 2022 – Director: Kristina Buozyte, Bruno Samper. Book: K. Buozyte, B. Samper, Brian Clark. Camera: Feliksas Abrukauskas. Starring: Raffiella Chapman, Rosy McEwen, Eddie Marsan. 114 minutes. Plaion rental. Theatrical release: October 6, 2022.