Laniakea
2020 · 6m · Ucrania
Directed by Dima Taran
Genres: experimental, mystery, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, surreal
In the future, when superluminal speeds allow travel to any point in the universe, people hope to find extraterrestrial life but so far nobody has found anything. One day, a solitary man finds a message in a monolith that has drifted in space, which helps him find a portal leading to the home planet of those who made the monolith — where he finds a giant, breathing structure. Where has everyone gone?
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Taran commits to the bit so fully—solipsistic sci-fi dressed up as cosmic mystery, a man chasing connection only to find *more* emptiness—that it almost sidesteps its own earnestness and becomes genuinely strange; the monolith as MacGuffin is exactly the kind of stunt that works better when nobody's winking.
The film inherits from a precise lineage of Soviet cosmist cinema and contemporary philosophical sci-fi, wielding negative space and silence with compositional discipline; Taran's formal restraint—the breathing structure revealed without fanfare, the message as anti-revelation—positions absence itself as the subject, situating *Laniakea* within a tradition that trusts the viewer to sit with ambiguity.
The revelation hinges entirely on a single sound design choice—that organic, almost-biological respiration overlaid on a geometric structure—which reframes the entire search from 'finding life' to 'recognizing it was always there,' and that one decision elevates what could've been standard first-contact whimsy into something genuinely unsettling on minimal means.