Moondays

The scouts

DePasquale's doing something genuinely perverse here—taking the sci-fi drug-trial premise (yawn) and letting it rot into pure absurdist theatre on an LED stage that shouldn't work but absolutely does, like someone made a Futurama episode with actual stakes and a budget the size of a shoebox.

The formal precision of the LED-volume staging—how it sits between live-action and animation without apologizing for either—places this in a specific lineage of digital formalism that recalls Soderbergh's experiments with constraint, though DePasquale commits more fully to the artificiality as a tonal choice.

The single decision that makes this sing: shooting the entire moon-base through virtual production means every frame has this hyper-controlled, almost synthetic sheen that lets the dark comedy breathe without fighting its own aesthetics—the stylization *becomes* the joke, and that one commitment justifies everything the film attempts.

Reviews

Moondays is like a dark episode of Futurama — a spaced-out absurdist comedy.

A high-budget sci-fi dark comedy shot on an indoor sound stage with LED screens.

Festivals

• FilmQuest 2024