The Space Between Us
2015 · 13m · Holanda
Directed by Marc S. Nollkaemper
Genres: drama, romance, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, mythic, tender
In a post-nuclear, oxygen-filled future, humble cleaner Juliette tests loyalty after falling in love with Adam, a captive merman whose gills hold humanity's last hope of survival. Love and duty collide.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Post-apocalyptic merman romance sounds like consensus sci-fi pulp, but Nollkaemper actually commits to the tenderness—he lets the absurdity breathe instead of winking at it, which is exactly the kind of sincere weirdness that usually gets strangled in development.
The film positions itself in a lineage of speculative fables—think Vigo's *L'Atalante* filtered through soft sci-fi—and the formal restraint in how it photographs the merman's otherness, the careful staging of intimacy against institutional duty, shows a director aware of the mythic grammar he's working in.
The real move here is sound design: those gills breathing underwater against the muted industrial hum of the facility become the emotional core, a single sonic choice that transforms what could've been YA melodrama into something genuinely haunted and specific.