Thalamos
2018 · 21m · Australia
Directed by Andrew Jaksch, Scott Robson
Genres: drama, sci-fi, thriller
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Commander Charlie Shaw leads a Mars mission through a 182-day voyage as isolation and failures threaten the crew's survival.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
It's competent space-isolation-breakdown stuff, which means it's exactly the film everyone expects sci-fi to be—tense, dark, technically sound, and utterly content to live in that lane without interrogating why we keep telling this story.
Jaksch and Robson demonstrate real command of the isolation thriller tradition—the 182-day structure becomes a formal constraint that pays dividends, and the restraint in their visual language (refusing melodrama even as the mission collapses) places this in conversation with the best of hard sci-fi cinema.
The film's control lives in its sound design and negative space: what isn't said between crew members during routine maintenance becomes the real pressure cooker, and that decision to let silence do the psychological work is what transforms a premise into something lived-in and true.