Keswick Film Festival

Synopsis

Vesper is a 13-year-old girl trying to rebuild a dying world. "Set in 'the new dark ages' — a ruined tomorrow in which the engineered viruses and organisms that humanity created in order to stem the planet's ecological crisis have escaped into the wild and remade life on Earth into a dreary (but awesome) Cronenbergian wasteland full of fleshy droids, bioluminescent critters, and trees whose spores try to suck out your internal tissue while you sleep — Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper's 'Vesper' has already drawn several comparisons to the likes of 'Stalker' and the Andrei Tarkovsky-inspired 'Annihilation.' It’s easy to see why.

Told at the somnambulant [pace] of a European art film but plotted with the simplicity of a fairy tale, the filmmaking duo's first feature since 2012's 'Vanishing Waves' offers a dramatically uneven but imaginatively vivid feat of post-apocalyptic world-building that flips the script on so many other stories like it.

Instead of using a variety of unique details to flesh out its familiar dystopian premise about the tension between a rich society of elites — who've barricaded themselves within Edenic fortresses known as 'Citadels' — and the scavengers they've abandoned to the mutant wilderness beyond the city walls, 'Vesper' blurs that age-old saga of haves and have-nots into a distant backdrop for something more interested in the flora and fauna that have evolved around it. If humans can have such a profound effect on nature, what effect might nature have on humanity in return?" – David Ehrlich, IndieWire.