‘Moonfish’ Review: Morgan Spector and Lucy Liu Voice a Spare but Evocative Animated Sci-Fi Suffused With Loneliness

A study in sadness, loneliness and the quixotic struggle to survive extremes, grayscale animated feature Moonfish offers an eerie, resonant microdrama set five hundred years or so from now. Brooklyn-based artist Daniel Zvereff’s feature debut after some lovely shorts (including Drago and Life Is a Particle Time Is a Wave) offers a deeply dystopian vision of the future wherein pairs of astronauts are little more than indentured servants, sent to mine asteroids with pickaxes, forewarned that if they don’t meet their quota, no one will come to collect them.

Morgan Spector and Lucy Liu voice one such ill-fated couple, bringing warmth to material that might otherwise have felt overwhelmingly depressing until a welcome upbeat ending glows up the story with a bit of color. Zvereff’s handmade, extremely spare and minimalist aesthetic, served up in a boxy, claustrophobic 4:3 ratio and featuring bald humans drawn with just a few fine lines, will limit this commercially to arthouses, fests and adventurous streamers. But the talent on display whets the appetite for the multihyphenate’s next projects after this work’s debut in Venice as part of the wider Biennale College.

Moonfish

The Bottom Line In space, no one can hear you cry.

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Biennale College Cinema)
Cast: Morgan Spector, Lucy Liu
Director/screenwriter/editor: Daniel Zvereff
1 hour 29 minutes

The opening minutes showing Cassius (Spector) and Vesper (Liu) sleeping in bed together on a space station, barely distinguishable given that both are bald and kitted-out in baggy clothes, suggest they are a romantic couple, although their interactions seem pretty sexless. They’re more like intimate co-workers, who quietly prepare to set off on a landing craft for an asteroid on which they have been contracted to collect chunks of rock for 355 days, the latter representing the amount of time it will take them to orbit the sun.

There is one more crew member making the journey with them: a goldfish, living in a plastic bag like the kinds of fish we here on earth win as prizes at fairgrounds. The piscine companion isn’t just there for the relaxing spectacle of watching it swim around though. Astronauts bring them on journeys to keep an eye on whether or not the water filtration systems are working, much the way miners used to take canaries down to the coal mines to check for poisonous gas leaks.

Unfortunately, an exceptionally rough landing on the asteroid not only wrecks the vehicle, making it unlikely that it can be used to fly back, but also (spoiler alert), Vesper is killed. Cassius lays her body on the surface outside, buried under rocks, and mourns her deeply, but he has no choice but to get on with the job and try to make up their daily quota alone.

But as the days pass in an indecipherable sameness and undifferentiated silence, Cassius starts to lose his grip on reality and begins to believe he can hear the fish talking to him with Vesper’s voice. Where most people would freak out over this, Cassius takes this strange turn of events in stride and finds comfort in his newly verbal companion, who still acts and thinks much like a fish, albeit one with more memory than one would expect given goldfishes’ reputation for short-term thinking. Together, they start to look at the planet the way Vesper did: not just as an inert hunk of rock to be mined, but as an almost animate creature in its own right, producing it’s own sounds, perhaps due to a heart somewhere under the surface.

Science fiction fans will be immediately put in mind of Stanislas Lem’s classic novel Solaris and its film adaptations (the first by Andrei Tarkovsky from 1972, the second by Steven Soderbergh from 2002), in which a sentient planet tries to make contact with a widowed astronaut by recreating his dead wife from memories dredged from the astronaut’s mind. Moonfish doesn’t quite take things to the same extremes, but there is a similar idea at play here about the unknowability of alien life and the mental strain of interplanetary travel.

There’s also a touch of the Alien-franchise here in the way the faceless organization that’s sending them out to space feels no loyalty for its employees, but luckily for the fish and Cassius there’s no murderous monster on this particular hunk of rock. In the end, this feels less like a critique of capitalism than an exploration of the importance of either returning home or making a new home, themes immigrant Zvereff has touchingly explored in his earlier work.