Dir: Marianna Dean. With: Zoe Cunningham, James Cosmo, Eloise Lovell Anderson, Mim Shaikh. 86 mins. Cert: 15 (tbc)
Its eyes and aspirations eternally bigger than its budget and reach, this Brit sci-fi calling card provides the answer to an unlikely question: what if someone remade 2011’s Source Code in an especially rundown outpost of Wetherspoons? Amid reported unrest between neighbouring planets Atopia and Cho-Hacha, mumsy anti-terror agent Alana Toro (Zoe Cunningham) receives orders from a hologrammatic James Cosmo to track down and bring in a troublesome rebel group. Her mission stalls, however, when she walks into a bar for interstellar truckers, where the film’s horizons shrink and – thanks to a timeloop device – our heroine gets several goes at interrogating the same skeleton crew of patrons and trying to resolve a convoluted, stubbornly uninvolving murder-mystery.
Along the way, flickers of B-movie ingenuity and invention catch the eye. Jamie Foote’s grimy, greasy set design hides some of the monetary limitations and ensures this is a rare modern sci-fi that inhabits a palpably physical, non-pixellated space; costumier Ciéranne Kennedy Bell visibly had immense fun dressing this troupe in cyberpunk finery that suggests some crossover between Red Dwarf and Claire’s Accessories; and the score, by Christoph Allerstorfer and James Griffiths, is that of a far more expansive and assured production. Alana herself is a promising pulp creation – a leather-clad, purple-wigged Miss Marple who gets to pull out a space blaster every now and again – even if Cunningham, with her distinct air of a school secretary who’s just uncovered a tuckshop scam, seems more than faintly miscast.
The torpedoing problems here can be traced back to Simon X. Frederick’s script – and it’s not just that title, with its unfortunate intestinal ring. The set-up entails a lot of deeply clunky expositional dialogue this ensemble struggles to sell, and the timeloop conceit just doesn’t work, reliant as it is on a repeated PA announcement that reaches ‘see it, say it, sorted’ levels of annoyance and a wristwatch that keeps having to spell out what soap alumna Marianna Dean’s direction, with its awkward bouts of action and sluggish pacing, doesn’t always make clear. A very British vision of the future, all told: cramped, impoverished and something of a drag.
Voidance is available to rent via Prime Video and other digital platforms from Monday 25.
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