Cries and Vespers

Vesper (2022) is the kind of thing we want to watch more of. Small-scale movies with big ideas.

It stars Raffiella Chapman as Vesper, a young girl livng in a post-apocalyptic world. The apocalypse was ecological collapse, combatted with genetic engineering, which didn't help. We meet her slogging through a muddy field, gleaned turnips that the harvesters missed. As the intro tells us, the upper classes moved to Citadels, where they sell seeds to the rest of the world. But the seeds are one-time only - their seeds are infertile.

Chapman goes around with a cubic drone, about the size of a small microwave. It hovers and has a crude face (two circles and a line for eyes and a mouth). It is run by her father, who is paralyzed in bed, in their little Depression era farmhouse (seems this catastrophe hit around 1930). The house runs on biotech, including a bacteria-based generator for electricity. When it goes out (sabotage?), her father's life support starts going out, so she has to visit her uncle.

Her uncle, Eddie Marsan, is a right bastarrd. He runs a colony that exchanges the blood of his many bastards, wives, etc, to the Citadel for seeds. He also has some gruesome subhuman bioconstructs working for him. While she visits him, he tries to convince her to join his tribe, which she gets out of. But she does steal a few seeds on her way out.

On her way home, she discovers a lovely young woman, Rosy McEwan. She realizes that Rosy comes from the nearest Citadel, because she's not covered in shit. She also has no survival skills, so Chapman takes her home. McEwan wants to find the crashed flyer that carried her and her father, or call the Citadel, but it's getting dark and the only way to contact the Citadel is through her uncle.

First little spoiler: McEwan is a construct, built by the "father", a bioengineer. She tells Chapman that she cared for him, soothed him, and he cared for her. This monologue goes on for a while - we get it, you're a sexbot. But her artificial genes hold a secret that might save, maybe not the world, but some parts of it.

This is not a movie about big tech, although there are flyers and drones, and there's even a shot of a Citadel. But it's more about hardscrabble rural life with weird biotech - the bacteria generator is like a big balky steam heat boiler. There are bags of culture everywhere and most of the food is gruel with some tasty mealworms. Then McEwan shows up, dressed in white, privileged and naive - I haven't seen Poor Things, but I got a similar vibe (maybe it's just that both characters have strong eyebrows). 

I was a little let down by the ending, but Ms. Spenser set me straight on a few things I had missed or misinterpreted, so never mind I guess. I prefer a little more tech in my sci-fi, but Vesper was a biotech genius, hoping to get into a Citadel to help the world. I would like to see that movie, too.