Epoch
2020 · 6m
Directed by Ethan Erickson
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
Astronaut Simmons tries to stay calm as his ship breaks apart in space, and as the vessel fails he is confronted by visions of his wife, children and father.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent sci-fi melodrama—the dying astronaut confronted by ghosts bit—but there's nothing here that subverts or destabilizes the premise; it's the exact movie the title promises, which is precisely the problem.
Erickson demonstrates real formal control in how he braids the vessel's deterioration with the psychological unraveling, each visual manifestation earned through deliberate editing choices that recall both Tarkovsky's meditative sci-fi and contemporary experimental narrative cinema.
The choice to stage the visions as fragmented, overlapping presences rather than clear flashbacks—letting abstraction do the emotional work instead of exposition—is what transforms a premise about grief into something that actually lands.