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Film
Moonfish
Daniel Zvereff, Pending release

In the song Space Oddity, David Bowie’s Major Tom drifts beyond the reach of Ground Control, poised between tech and terror. The protagonist in Daniel Zvereff’s animation, Moonfish, occupies a similarly lonely orbit, but one that demolishes the fantasy of space travel, instead depicting work, radiation, quotas and the slow psychological erosion of being almost alone.

Cassius (Morgan Spector), a deep-space miner, is travelling with his companion Vesper (Lucy Liu) to an asteroid. Work is brutal: meet extraction quotas to earn passage home or stay, stranded. When Vesper dies in an accident, Cassius must complete the mission alone, with only her goldfish and the unreliable contents of his mind for company.

Moonfish premiered at the Venice Biennale last month, and cost a mere €200,000 to make. Zvereff turns that constraint into an aesthetic: drawing in stark black and white, building from simple lines, using a boxy frame and sparse environments that make Cassius’s universe feel both enormous and suffocating. What might have looked unfinished is the right visual language to express alienation, a man reduced to a few fragile marks against a void.

The scientific details of this world are left speculative; science ends up functioning as pressure. So, Cassius’s body is another system to fail before the machinery does – prolonged exposure to radiation in space has consequences requiring medication to function. Asteroid mining isn’t heroic exploration, but rather the economic logic of using vulnerable workers when tech costs more. This is one of the film’s bleakest tropes – and one of its most plausible.

But its most compelling element is the bond Cassius develops with the fish, which, as grief and isolation set in, speaks in Vesper’s voice. The exchanges become the film’s philosophical core, touching on consciousness, memory, mortality and what distinguishes life from non-life. This could have tipped into whimsy, but Liu endows the fish with an eerie tenderness, while Spector makes Cassius’s exhaustion feel physical.

Moonfish is ultimately less interested in whether humans mine asteroids than in who might, and under what terms. Its space setting amplifies existing concerns on Earth: precarious labour, dependence on tech, loneliness and the monetisation of endurance. Like Major Tom, Cassius drifts further from the systems supposed to keep him connected. The difference is that this Ground Control isn’t merely distant; it is his employer.

Davide Abbatescianni is a film critic based in Rome