Sometimes We Need the Perspective of an Alien Spider

How do you see something about your own life that you are too close to see?

You can think harder. You can interrogate your decisions, examine your motives and attempt to recognise the assumptions underneath them. But there is an obvious problem with this method: you are using the same mind that made those decisions, constructed those explanations and acquired those assumptions in the first place. Sometimes what we need is a perspective that begins somewhere else entirely.

Preferably, apparently, the perspective of an enormous alien spider.

Spaceman arrived on Netflix in March 2024 after premiering as a Special Gala at the Berlin International Film Festival. It was an unusual project on several fronts. Johan Renck, who won an Emmy and a Directors Guild of America Award for directing HBO’s Chernobyl, returned to feature filmmaking with an adaptation of Jaroslav Kalfař’s 2017 novel Spaceman of Bohemia. Colby Day wrote the screenplay, Carey Mulligan and Paul Dano joined the cast, and Adam Sandler continued the strand of his career established by films such as Punch-Drunk Love, The Meyerowitz Stories and Uncut Gems: reminding everybody periodically that the man from Grown Ups is also a very good dramatic actor. (berlinale.de)

The result divided critics. Spaceman is slow, melancholy and much more interested in a failing marriage than in the scientific possibilities of its journey to the edge of the Solar System. Its Metacritic score settled at 55, while Rotten Tomatoes recorded a similarly divided critical response. Some reviewers found it ponderous; others found something moving and unusual in Sandler’s restrained performance and the film’s strange combination of domestic drama, metaphysical science fiction and couples therapy conducted by a giant arachnid. (Metacritic)

Sandler plays Jakub Procházka, a Czech astronaut sent hundreds of millions of kilometres from Earth to investigate a mysterious cloud near Jupiter. Six months into the mission, the marriage he left behind is collapsing. Then Jakub discovers an enormous spider hiding aboard his spacecraft. The spider, voiced by Dano, becomes Hanuš: an ancient, telepathic extraterrestrial who can move through Jakub’s memories and is considerably more interested in the state of Jakub’s inner life than the historic importance of his mission.

That is where Spaceman becomes interesting. Jakub already has explanations for his life. He is an astronaut. His work matters. He has accepted enormous personal sacrifices to achieve something extraordinary. He has travelled into deep space on behalf of his country and humanity. Hanuš has the considerable advantage of not caring about any of that. He comes from somewhere beyond human civilisation, so careers, prestige and national achievement hold no automatic significance for him. He has no reason to accept the hierarchy of importance that Jakub has spent his life accepting. He simply looks at the human being in front of him, and from that perspective Jakub’s life looks rather different.