'Aniara' Trailer: A Journey From Earth To Mars Becomes An Existential Nightmare

When's the last time you saw a sci-fi movie about space travel that was pleasant? I'm having a hard time thinking up one at the moment, because the majority are usually about all the terrible things that await us foolish humans if we dare break through the stratosphere, and beyond. The Swedish sci-fi film Aniara is definitely one of those "terrible things" movies, telling the story of a ship loaded with people traveling from Earth to Mars. The journey is scheduled to take three weeks, but the ship gets knocked off course. A whole lot of panic and terror ensues. Watch the Aniara trailer below.

Well, this looks...fun. And by fun I mean nerve-jangling. In Aniara, "a ship carrying settlers to Mars is knocked off course, causing the consumption-obsessed passengers to consider their place in the universe." The movie is based on a work by Swedish Nobel Prize–winning writer Harry Martinson, and comes from the filmmaking team of Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja.

If you're a frequent reader around these here parts, Aniara might sound familiar to you. That's because we've mentioned it before. This is the film that was screened inside coffins during The Goteborg Film Festival in January. At the time, festival director Jonas Holmberg said that screening Aniara inside a coffin "the bleak themes of the movie's late-era capitalism dystopian setting." Holmberg also described the film as "a drama about a spaceship carrying consumption-obsessed passengers, knocked off course en route to Mars," serving as "a metaphor for Earth, that the future of our planet could be this kind of sarcophagus, floating alone through space as we use up our natural resources...Our goal was to find a way to take the experience of the film, and the apocalypse, further. To take the sense of aloneness and claustrophobia and strengthen it."

In other words, don't go into Aniara expecting a laugh riot. If anything, get ready to leave the film haunted, and questioning your place in the universe. Doesn't that sound cool? I think so, at least.

Aniara, starring Emelie Jonsson, Arvin Kananian, Bianca Cruzeiro, Anneli Martini, Jennie Silfverhjelm, Peter Carlberg, and Emma Broomé, blasts off in theaters May 17, 2019. Sadly, you won't be able to watch it in a coffin like the attendees of the Goteborg Film Festival. Unless you bring your own coffin to the theater.