Stars, Secrets & Disappointments: My Take on "The Astronaut" (2025)
- Dan Brooks
- Sep 30, 2025
- 4 min read
After returning from her first space mission, astronaut Sam Walker is placed under NASA's care at a high security house for rehabilitation and medical testing. However, when disturbing occurrences begin happening around the property, she fears that something extraterrestrial has followed her back to Earth.
I watched The Astronaut with the same cautious optimism you might bring to a blind date set up by your eccentric cousin. “She’s good for visuals, and she won’t talk too much,” he told me. That’s sort of what this movie promises: slick film design, a minimal cast, a weird atmosphere. And for about an hour, it mostly delivers. Then somewhere between the second act and the final twist, it reminds you you’re not watching 2001: A Space Odyssey. You’re watching Jess Varley’s first feature. And in that revealing moment, you decide it’s okay to call it what it is: a nice try, but a stumble in space boots.
Let’s start with what works, because I’m not a monster (well, not always). Laurence Fishburne, playing General William Harris (Sam’s adoptive father / NASA overseer), brings exactly the gravitas you want. He’s the guy who could read a grocery list and make it sound like Shakespeare. Even when the dialogue around him is sliding into clichés, he holds firm. That’s no small feat. Kate Mara, in the lead as Sam Walker, has a great setup - returning from space, haunted, isolated - but sometimes she seems to be carrying only half of the emotional load. When she channels fear or confusion, it lands. But in quieter scenes, you often feel the emptiness of the production’s constraints.
Visually, for much of the run, The Astronaut is doing the heavy lifting. The isolated house in the woods, minimal but slick interiors, strategic lighting - all of that whispers, “Something’s off here.” It’s a bit like The Fly meeting Signs meets Alien-lite. There’s eggs levitating. There are bruises appearing. Hallucinations. All the modern haunted-house / sci-fi tropes get rolled out in rotation. The first two acts, I was leaning forward in my seat. And then… the third act bent that seat backward and left me with whiplash.
That’s where things go off-course. The pacing cramps up; the story starts rushing through revelations, like a kid trying to read the last page of a mystery novel before turning back every page. You can see the ambition - there are ideas here about trust, about what it means to be “infected” (in body or in mind), about how the people closest to us might betray us. But the script doesn’t always give those ideas space to breathe. Instead, it hammers. And in doing so, it loses some of its emotional weight.
Also: the dialogue occasionally dips into flavorless territory. It’s not atrocious, but there are lines that feel like placeholders: “We need answers,” “Something followed me here,” etc. At moments I wondered if the writer was just buying time until the weird alien stuff could resume. And yes - the sound design. There are jump scares. There are ambient frequencies that aim for dread. Sometimes they work. Sometimes they’re just background noise reminding you, “Yes, you’re watching a thriller sci-fi.” It doesn’t always trust silence, which is a shame, because silence is the best weapon in these films.
Another quirk: the movie gives itself permission to be minimal. The plot is mostly Sam in the house, reacting to weird things. There’s little in the way of side characters, little outside interruption. That’s not inherently bad - in fact, minimalism can be powerful - but it demands finesse. And The Astronaut occasionally feels like a pandemic-era film (not just because it was likely made in COVID times) in how much it leans on one person’s experience alone, without much external push.
Still - there’s brain food here. The notion that we might carry something unknowable when we return from the dark, the fear of what our bodies betray us with, the ambiguity between internal trauma and external menace - those are cool ideas. Even if the movie sometimes pushes them too fast or too shallow, I appreciated the attempt.
One more thing: the budget. This is not Interstellar. It doesn’t pretend to be. You can feel the filmmakers worked within real constraints. So when I critique the final twist or the rushed payoffs, I do so while tipping my hat: I see the ambition. I see the promise. I see what could've been if they'd had a few more script passes or 20% more runtime. It's like watching a painter who has a beautiful vision but had only half a palette and a tight schedule.
In short: The Astronaut is a watchable sci-fi thriller with flair, ambition, and some solid performances - but it's held back by pacing and occasional dialogue slipups. It doesn’t quite soar, but it also doesn’t crash and burn. If you like eerie, contained sci-fi with psychological overtones - and you’re okay that it doesn’t fully stick the landing - you might find value here. Just don’t go in expecting the next Alien.
Final Verdict / Ranking
5.0 / 10
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