Escape Attempt

When you’re just starting out, one of the best ways to get established as a filmmaker, and to make work that is financially viable, is to focus on short film. Some people have no idea how to scale their ambitions, however, with the result that, every now and again, a work emerges which seems far too big for the format to contain. Based on the novella by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, who situated their story within a much larger pre-established universe, Escape Attempt has the style and quality one might expect of a blockbuster. It has been a hit on the festival circuit, and is screening at Fantasia 2024.

The opening of the film might throw you a little. A familiar, grimy uniform. A hand torn on barbed wire. There are familiar images of a Nazi concentration camp; and yet when Saul (Andrzej Chyra) stumbles out through the trees, he is cleanly dressed and seems unsurprised to see a spaceship resting on a lake, a young couple relaxing beside it. Is he, as he tells them, a historian of the 20th Century – perhaps emerging from an intense reverie – or is something stranger going on?

The young couple are on a honeymoon trip, but agree to let Saul hitch a ride with them anyway. He wants to be dropped off on an uninhabited planet. He has, he says, had enough of humankind. They identify a world orbiting a yellow dwarf star, with suitable Earth-like conditions, that won’t take them far out of their way – but what they find there changes everything.

Do we choose our destinies, or are we shaped by the environments in which we find ourselves? If some people have advanced to a point where they are free from conflict and naturally predisposed to help one another, does that make any real difference to contemporaries who exist at a different stage of development, or in a different psychological space? To what extent is conflict a product of belief, of investment in it as a perceived solution to a point where other options disappear from view? And if we did get beyond it, would it come to seem equally incomprehensible to us then?

All of these questions and more are explored in this dense little tale, supported by imagery on a scale that helps us to understand how individuals can feel helpless, their powers of imagination crushed beneath the weight of social mechanisms. Saul finds himself bridging a gulf of understanding, but in doing so he must acknowledge his own roots, the weight of his instincts, and the fact that he – and the film’s viewers – are still culturally far closer to the savagery of the past that haunts us than to our utopian ideals. As long as we remain motivated by jam today, tomorrow remains out of reach.

A highly accomplished, polished piece of work, Escape Attempt is a reminder of much great Soviet science fiction remains unread and unseen in the West. It’s an elegant rendition, and one hopes that team behind it will have the chance to revisit this universe in a larger format where they can really give it its due.