Ambitious sci-fi from Lithuania – but in English, before you switch off – Vesper is all about the world-building and the genre-tasting. One minute a coming-of-ager, another a love story, yet another a quest movie, its overriding vibe is the eco-apocalyptic thriller, set in a doomy world after the collapse of civilisation, where humans fight each other and an aggressive ecology for supremacy.
Vesper Chronicles, the on-screen title actually proclaims, as if this were going to be the first of a series of movies. There is a Young Adult, almost Hunger Games aspect in its focus on a rugged young woman as its central figure. Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) lives out in a blasted world where, when not scavenging for food, she keeps her persistently vegetative father alive and negotiates relations with the Citadel, where the elite still live in some luxury.
Jennifer Lawrence is probably somewhere in the range of references and interestingly there is a hint of her breakthrough, Winter’s Bone, in the relations of a practical young woman to a hostile world where family is as much a burden as a help, and where aid, when sought, will be hard to come by. Dad, to all intents and purposes a husk, has uploaded his consciousness into a drone, which accompanies Vesper most places (helicopter parenting alive and well after the collapse of everything else) but is not able to go with her when she heads off to seek help from his brother, Jonas (Eddie Marsan), who has vital blood supplies but wants Vesper as a “breeder” in return.
It’s a very organic, fungal bit of sci-fi. Mushrooms abound, invasive plants proliferate, spores float on the air. The idea is that the entire ecosystem is hostile. If you rest for a minute you’ll be predated. One of the major plot turns involves Vesper finding Citadel dweller Camellia (Rosy McEwen) in the forest, where she is covered in fungal wefts and is about to succumb to extreme mycological attack. Instead, Vesper takes her home to meet a less than delighted dad, and a “will they/won’t they?” romantic avenue opens up for the plot.
The plot does keep doing this – diving up new avenues – and a lore-heavy, detail-dense film is the result, with new genre twists being added at every turn. Is Camellia, for example, a Snow White lost in the woods? Or is she the Wicked Queen? Dot, dot, dot…
Vesper directors Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper work together regularly, though he usually gets a co-writer credit. This 2022 movie was their first standalone collaboration since 2012’s Vanishing Waves (aka Aurora), which was also sci-fi and in English. That was more European in its sci-fi approach, with hints of Tarkovsky in its story about a man forming a relationship with an avatar. It also featured Lithuanian actors, which gave the English dialogue an intriguing distancing effect.
Here, it’s all native English speakers in front of the camera – Chapman’s wide eyes make her a distinctive and attractive star, McEwen wears dark contacts that lend her a spooky aspect, the ever-reliable Marsan is the transactional Jonas, and Richard Brake as bedbound dad Darius essentially gets to do voicework.
An uneasy member of the myco-horror club, Vesper could be racked up alongside In the Earth and Gaia (both from 2021). Crowd-pleasing, big budget movie-making for a modest outlay is the idea, and Buozyte and Samper get most of the way there. Perhaps if it were more its own beast and less calculating in its attempt to appeal it would, ironically, be more appealing. Vanishing Waves was fascinating, and so is Vesper, but there’s undeniably a bit of “what might have been” going on here.
Vesper – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
