There’s a moment about an hour into The Astronaut where I paused the stream, leaned back, and thought, “Okay, this is actually working.” Kate Mara’s astronaut was unraveling in a sleek Irish safe house, shadow creatures were lurking in the woods, and the paranoid atmosphere had its hooks in me. Then I pressed play again, watched the final 30 minutes, and felt that goodwill evaporate like water in a vacuum.
Writer-director Jess Varley’s feature debut isn’t without merit—there are stretches where it hums with genuine tension, and Mara delivers a performance that deserves a better movie wrapped around it. But by the time those bargain-bin CGI aliens showed up to explain the plot through telepathy, I realized I’d been watching a film that didn’t know how to deliver on its own ambitious setup.
The Setup: Familiar But Effective
The Astronaut opens with Captain Sam Walker (Kate Mara) crash-landing back to Earth after her first space mission. When rescue teams pull her from the punctured capsule floating off the Atlantic coast, she’s miraculously alive despite holes in both her spacecraft and helmet. It’s an effective hook that immediately raises questions: What happened up there? And how did she survive?
Varley, making her feature directorial debut after helming segments of the 2021 horror anthology Phobias (which I haven’t seen yet, but now I’m intrigued), establishes an isolated, paranoid atmosphere quickly. Sam is placed in a sleek, modern safe house deep in the Irish woods under the watchful eye of General William Harris (Laurence Fishburne), who happens to be her adoptive father. She’s supposed to be recovering and undergoing medical testing, but we know something’s off from the jump.
The film borrows liberally from the sci-fi-horror playbook—think Alien meets Close Encounters with a dash of The Fly. Sam develops spreading bruises, experiences hallucinations of shadow figures, discovers she has telekinetic abilities, and begins seeing black creatures stalking the property. For about 60 minutes, this formula works. The production design is crisp, the sound design unsettling, and the slow-burn pacing builds genuine tension.
Kate Mara: The MVP
Let me be clear: Kate Mara is phenomenal in this. She carries the film almost entirely on her shoulders, and she does it with the kind of committed, grounded performance that elevates mediocre material. There’s a vulnerability and determination to her portrayal of Sam that feels authentic—you believe she’s both a capable astronaut and someone genuinely terrified by what’s happening to her.
Mara brings what one reviewer aptly described as “just the right mix of heart and grit.” Whether she’s trying to hide her symptoms to get cleared for her next mission or fleeing through air ducts from shadowy creatures, she sells every moment. In a film where she’s alone for much of the runtime, that’s crucial. Without her performance, The Astronaut would’ve been dead in the water.
The supporting cast is fine but underutilized. Fishburne does his usual dependable work as the stern military figure, Gabriel Luna is serviceable as Sam’s estranged husband Mark, and there’s a small role for singer Macy Gray as a NASA colleague. But this is Mara’s show, and thankfully, she’s more than up to the task.
The Reveal: Bold on Paper, Clumsy in Execution
Here’s where things went off the rails for me. Around the 75-minute mark, The Astronaut pulls its big twist: Sam isn’t actually human. She’s an alien who crash-landed in the Mojave Desert years ago as a child, took on the appearance of a human girl, and has been living this life ever since. The black creatures stalking her aren’t extraterrestrial invaders—they’re her real alien family trying to reconnect with her. Her “disguise” is literally falling apart, which explains the spreading bruises and physical transformation.
On paper? That’s an interesting subversion. The film pivots from “astronaut brings alien home” to “the astronaut IS the alien” with a side of governmental conspiracy—General Harris apparently orchestrated Sam’s entire space mission as bait to lure in and capture her alien family.
In practice? It feels rushed, underdeveloped, and tonally jarring. The film shifts from tense sci-fi-horror into something that wants to be an emotional family drama about identity and belonging, but it hasn’t earned that pivot. We spend 70 minutes thinking we’re watching one kind of movie, then get 20 minutes of a completely different one.
The Visual Effects Problem
And then there are those creatures. Look, I understand budget constraints—this was clearly not a massive studio production. But those alien CGI effects in the final act are genuinely rough. Multiple reviewers noted that the CGI looks like it’s from 25 years ago, and they’re not wrong. The black shadowy creatures work better when they’re just glimpses in the darkness, playing on our imagination. Once they’re fully revealed and having telepathic conversations with Sam, the illusion crumbles.
The creature design itself isn’t particularly inspired either. They’re vaguely humanoid shadow beings without much personality or memorable visual characteristics. For a film that’s building to this big revelation, the actual aliens are surprisingly forgettable. I kept thinking about how much more effective the film might’ve been if Varley had leaned into practical effects or kept the creatures more obscured.
The final confrontation in the woods, where the aliens telepathically reveal Sam’s true nature, should be this big emotional crescendo. Instead, it feels awkward and rushed, with the low-quality effects undermining what should be the film’s most impactful moment.
The Underwhelming Ending
After the big reveal, the film just kind of… ends. Sam embraces her alien nature, transforms fully (covered in some kind of placenta-like material—yikes), and apparently everyone just accepts this and moves on? There’s a weird tonal shift where what should be horrifying or at least deeply complicated gets treated as almost inspirational.
The film wants to stick a landing about family, identity, and self-acceptance, but it hasn’t built the emotional groundwork to pull that off. We barely know Sam as a character beyond “dedicated astronaut with family tensions,” so when the film asks us to invest in this revelation about her true nature, there’s nothing to grab onto.
It doesn’t help that the ending feels abrupt. Just when you expect maybe another 15-20 minutes to explore the implications of all this, the credits roll. Questions pile up: What happens to Sam now? What about her human family? What’s Harris’s endgame? The film seems to think its twist is enough of a payoff, but it really isn’t.
What Worked
Despite my frustrations, I don’t want to completely trash The Astronaut. There’s genuine craft on display here, particularly in the first two acts.
Cinematographer Dave Garbett (who worked on Evil Dead Rise) creates some genuinely striking images. The overhead drone shots of the Irish forests are gorgeous, and the lighting design—particularly during the security lockdown sequences bathed in red light—creates real atmosphere. Production designer Alan Gilmore gives the safe house a sleek, modern aesthetic that makes it feel simultaneously comfortable and unsettling.
The sound design deserves praise too. Jacques Brautbar’s score effectively builds tension, and the use of ringing in Sam’s ears during her episodes creates disorientation that pulls you into her headspace. There are moments of genuine unease in the first half that come purely from smart audio choices.
Varley also shows promise as a visual storyteller. She stages a few effective jump scares and knows how to use negative space and shadows. There’s a sequence mimicking the famous kitchen scene from Jurassic Park that’s been criticized as borderline plagiaristic, but taken on its own terms, it’s well-executed (even if unnecessary).
The First-Time Filmmaker Problem
Watching The Astronaut, you can feel it’s a debut feature. Varley has ambition and visual style, but the screenplay—which she also wrote—needed more development. The dialogue is often clunky, particularly when characters are explaining plot points. There’s a moment where Sam, a NASA astronaut who just returned from space, looks up UFO conspiracy theories online, and I nearly laughed out loud. Really? That’s what we’re doing?
The pacing is uneven. The slow burn works for a while, then starts to drag, then suddenly everything happens at once in the final 20 minutes. It feels like Varley either ran out of time or money (or both) and had to compress what should’ve been a longer, more developed conclusion into a rushed finale.
There’s also an identity crisis at the film’s core. Is this a horror movie? A psychological thriller? A sci-fi drama about first contact? A family story about identity? It tries to be all of these things and doesn’t fully commit to any of them. The tonal shifts are jarring, and by the end, I wasn’t sure what kind of movie I’d just watched.
The Bigger Picture
The Astronaut premiered at South by Southwest in March 2025 and was picked up by Vertical for theatrical release this October. It’s clearly positioned as a fall horror release, but it’s not quite a horror film. The marketing leans into the “something followed her home from space” angle, but that’s not really what the movie is about.
Producer Brad Fuller, who’s behind the A Quiet Place and Purge franchises, gives the film some genre credibility. You can see his influence in the contained, high-concept premise. But The Astronaut doesn’t have the tight execution of those films. It’s messier, more ambitious, and ultimately less satisfying.
Interestingly, Emma Roberts was originally cast in the lead before Kate Mara took over in September 2023. I can’t help but wonder if that production shake-up affected the final product. Regardless, Mara was the right choice—she’s the film’s greatest asset.
Final Thoughts
The Astronaut frustrates me because there’s a really good movie buried in here somewhere. With tighter pacing, better visual effects, and a more developed third act, this could’ve been a memorable addition to the sci-fi-horror canon. Instead, it’s a mixed bag that will likely be forgotten quickly.
Kate Mara deserves to be in a better movie than this. Her performance is the reason to watch The Astronaut, and she elevates material that doesn’t always deserve her commitment. If you’re a fan of hers, it’s worth checking out for her work alone.
But for everyone else? This is a rental at best. The first hour has enough atmosphere and tension to keep you engaged, but that final act deflates everything that came before. The big twist is more interesting in concept than execution, the CGI creatures look cheap, and the ending feels like Varley wasn’t sure how to land her ambitious premise.
I wanted to love The Astronaut. I really did. For a while, I thought I was watching something special—a contained, atmospheric sci-fi thriller with a great lead performance. But by the time those unconvincing CGI aliens were explaining the plot through telepathy, I’d checked out.
Maybe on a second viewing, knowing where it’s headed, the pieces would fit together better. But first impressions matter, and my first impression is that The Astronaut is a noble failure from a promising filmmaker who bit off more than she could chew on her debut feature.
Here’s hoping Jess Varley gets another shot. She’s got talent and vision. She just needs a stronger script, more resources, and maybe a producer willing to tell her when something isn’t working. Because with Kate Mara giving that kind of performance and that kind of atmospheric setup, this should’ve been so much better than it turned out to be.
Rating: 5/10 — Elevated by Mara’s performance but ultimately undone by a weak third act, underwhelming effects, and an ending that doesn’t stick the landing.
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