A young girl wanders a desolate post-apocalyptic landscape in search of a cure for her dying father in Vesper, a new European co-production that had its world premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival this weekend, playing in the main competition.
While Vesper’s storytelling often feels conventional, the attention to detail with which directors Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper bring their world to life is the real star of the show. This is a fully-realized, even breathtaking vision that justifies the unusual proposition of a genre film playing in competition at a major festival.
An opening scrawl helps introduce Vesper’s unusual world: mankind attempted to hack the world’s biosphere in order to cure a pandemic, but ended up creating an apocalyptic event. Now, all animal species have been wiped out while new plant life has developed animal-like traits.
The world’s elite live in walled-off cities called Citadels, and provide nurturing seeds to those on the outside; seeds that have been genetically altered to provide a single yield and keep the wretches in their service.
Raffiella Chapman stars as the titular Vesper, who opens the film scavenging a desolate landscape that consists of muddy swamps and foreboding woods. The forests of Lithuania are a perfect fit for the film’s grim-but-hopeful tone, which mixes Mad Max-style post-apocalyptic sci-fi with the flair of European folk tales.
Young Vesper is something of a bio-hacking scientist herself, and has been experimenting with the strange new plant life in an effort to save her bedridden father Darius (Richard Brake), afflicted with an unknown illness. The vibrant, often neon-accented plants that inhabit Vesper’s world include flash-sucking leech-like vines, spores that pop up from underground burrows when they sense movements, and bushes that shoot out fiery projectiles when disturbed.
Despite being completely immobile, Brake’s character joins Vesper on her travels through a hovering sphere drone adorned with a hand-painted face a la Wilson in Cast Away. The drone, a real-life prop, floated onstage to join members of Vesper’s cast and crew at the Grand Hall in Hotel Thermal on Saturday night, providing a memorable festival highlight.
Vesper’s mission is altruistic, but she’s up against an insidious threat: her uncle Jonas (Eddie Marsan), a Bill Sikes-like character who collects blood from his band of outcast children to trade the Citadel for seeds. Marsan provides Vesper with a suitably detestable villain, though the characterization often feels one-note; his motivations are too often blandly and predictably evil instead of logical.
A glimmer of hope is provided by Camellia (Rosy McEwen), a Citadel elite who crash-lands outside the walls of her sanctuary and into Vesper’s dire marshes. As Vesper nurses her back to health, she learns that Camellia’s genes may hold the secrets to helping her father… and countless others.
While Vesper’s plot outline is boilerplate – the search for a cure in a world ravaged by virus or zombies or other affliction is a well-worn sci-fi trope – the living, breathing world that the film creates is really something to behold.
The great care taken to create Vesper’s imaginative flora, mechanical creations, background props and rough-hewn sets is apparent in just about every frame; while this kind of thing is taken for granted in a Star Wars film, it’s refreshing to see it in an independent European production.
Vesper’s scale is small – the action is largely limited to the forests of Lithuania – but its scope is large; directors Buozyte and Samper, who previously collaborated on 2012’s Vanishing Waves, do justice to their grand vision despite being limited by their script. Led by a pair of strong performances from Chapman and McEwen, Vesper is an evocative journey through a captivating new world.
