Spaceman (2024) – Review

Whenever Adam Sandler decides to tackle a role with substance – rather than shape an entire comedy around just him hanging with his mates – the result has always been something that requires you to sit up and take notice. Both Punch Drunk Love and Uncut Gems saw the actor expand on more than just putting on a silly voice and just screaming a lot and for his next venture into serious territory, it’s time for the Sandman to become a space man.
On paper, Adam Sandler does Solaris sounds potentially like the most unappealing movie ever made, and yet thanks to Johan Renck (director of the thrillingly harrowing Chernobyl), Spaceman is an odd, esoteric, somber film that mostly manages to forge its own path despite relying a bit too heavily on the Pretentious Sci-Fi Handbook during its third act. It’s time to unpack some intergalactic depression as we embark on a therapy session that’s literally out of this world.

Six months into his solo mission to explore a mysterious dust cloud on the edge of Jupiter, Czech astronaut Jakub Procházka finally starting to feel the isolation. He’s not sleeping thanks to the God awful screeching the toilet system makes and he’s growing incredibly anxious as his pregnant wife, Lenka, has stopped sending him messages.
The reason for this is essentially Lenka is done with being abandoned by her husband in favour of his work, but her message telling Jakub that she’s leaving him is blocked by his commanding officer as they fear it’ll harm the astronaut’s already worsening mental state.
However, things are far more weirder than they could have ever expected as Jakub is greeted by a large spider-like alien that has gotten aboard his craft and communicates with him telepathically. At first, Jakub is understandably alarmed – after all, extraterrestrial arachnids with the soothing, cool tones of Paul Dano aren’t something to come across every day – but after the creature assures the astronaut that it has no plans to eat him or lay eggs anywhere on his person, it’s true intentions prove to be surprisingly benevolent.
Basically an explorer just like Jakub, the creature – which is given the name Hanuš – has been drawn here by the spaceman’s loneliness as wishes to see if it can help while it Studios the complexities of human behaviour, and so a prolonged therapy session begins, as Hanuš attempts to break down Jakub’s insecurities and social barriers to get to the root of his emotional problems.
In doing so, Jakub realises he could save his flagging marriage, but there’s still the little matter of the mysterious space cloud, that might hold within it the secrets of the origins of the universe.

Adam Sandler has always played hangdog incredibly well as evidenced by not only some of his dramatic roles, but also in some of his comedic ones as well. Often playing a lovable, yet frustrated, shlub who takes life on the chin with a resigned nod and an razor sharp retort, he gets to explore it to the ultimate degree as a sad-eyed space explorer who is starting to crack under the intense loneliness his life has entailed. Closed off and hyper focused on his work, we see via flashbacks how his relationship with Lenka (Carey Mulligan doing lots with limited screen time) initially blossomed before he started taking her for granted in favour of space exploration.
Sandler is great, going through his isolated existence with giant, soulful, red rimmed eyes as he wearily debates with mission control over which of the ships failing facilities needs to be seen to first (busted cameras take priority over a rattling crapper, apparently) and there’s some subtle hints at the male nature of keeping everything bottled where it can cause the most harm. As he grinds away at his mission, fighting off atrophy and fielding uncomfortable questions about loneliness from school kids, Jakub has no idea that his superiors are debating how to contain his collapsing marriage and the actor really nails the impact all this emotional pressure has on the human mind.

However, while other movies have dealt with this in a variety of ways, none have quite tackled it with the appearance of an eight-legged alien that volunteers its sevices to help unravel years of pent up trauma and emotional constipation that Jakub has had building within him for years. As a result, Paul Dano’s Hamuš is something of a revelation, centering the dipm justices much as it attempts to centre Jakub’s emotional state and the best moments of the film prove to be their sessions. Somehow, Tenck and his team of animators have made Hamuš one of the most soothing aliens in the recent history of sci-fi cinema, which is astounding when you consider that 6% of the population is afflicted with arachnophobia. Yet with its (eight) big brown eyes, its gental Paul Dano voice and a genuinely sweet need to help a fellow traveler in pain, Hamuš proves to be an inspired creation.
However, while I would have been content to simply watch this outlandish therapy unspool for the whole movie, the movie tries to go transcendent in its final reel and as a result, loses a chunk of the intimacy it had spent so much time setting up. While other directors as diverse as Danny Boyle (Sunshine), Christopher Nolan (Interstellar) and Steven Spielberg (A.I.). have followed in Stanley Kubrick’s footsteps thanks to 2001: A Space Odyssey and gone full weird, sometimes it offsets the humanity instead of enhancing it.
However, Spaceman works best when mixing the absurdist surrealist therapy of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind with Moon’s meditation of loneliness and just gives us the sight of Adam Sandler offloading decades of emotional detritus to cinema’s most understanding spider. It’s not perfect, but as a heartfelt, space oddity, Spaceman offers up some truly touching moments, some truly gorgeous cosmic beauty and yet another example that maybe Sandler should act mature a hell of a lot more often.

While it takes its eye off the ball during the third act by using its nebulous space macguffin to make its point, Renck’s somber movie works best when it focuses on the healing between a man and a spider who share a fondness for hazelnut spread.

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