We’re only three months into 2025, but somehow it doesn’t feel too early to pick the worst sci-fi flick of the year. “The Astronaut,” which premiered at the SXSW festival on Friday, was a disappointing, baffling slog. Kate Mara, Laurence Fishburne, and Gabriel Luna are all great actors, but they can’t save a script that refuses to go anywhere interesting or say anything meaningful. 

The movie is about an astronaut named Sam Walker (Kate Mara), who has returned all bruised up from her first ever trip to space. NASA thinks something broke into her space shuttle as it descended back to Earth, so they keep her in an isolated house in Virginia while they figure it out. What follows is a dragged-out haunted house movie, where spooky stuff keeps gradually escalating around Walker. If you hate jump scares, tough luck: that’s all the second act of this film has to offer.

Like all the worst protagonists in a haunted house narrative, Walker takes forever to figure out a situation that the audience figured out in the first few minutes. Yes, there’s an in-movie explanation for why she’s so reluctant to take the threat seriously or do 90% of the common-sense things a real person would do in this situation, but that doesn’t make her inaction any less frustrating to watch. 

In the Q&A segment afterward, Gabriel Luna (who plays Sam’s separated husband Mark) summed up Sam’s character by saying, “In any other kind of horror picture, you’re like, ‘This person is an idiot. Why are they doing this?’ But she’s Captain Sam Walker and you can believe that she would investigate to the fullest extent.” Love you Gabriel, but I have no idea what you were talking about here. I was 100% thinking, “Why is she doing this?” for 80% of the runtime. 

This film is director/writer Jess Varley’s directorial debut, and there are a lot of little moments which give this away. The first act features a lot of seemingly random, unmotivated needle drops, and visual flairs tossed in that seem like they’re only there because the director thought they looked cool. There’s also a sequence at the end that borrows heavily from the aesthetics of the “Jurassic Park” kitchen sequence, but with none of the fun hide-and-seek hijinks that sequence brought with it. There are bits in “The Astronaut” that harken back to better sci-fi movies like “E.T.” and “Close Encounters,” which only further reminds us of how much this movie is lacking.

Where “The Astronaut” drops the ball most is with that final act, where it reveals that the movie’s been building up to a big, silly, unconvincing twist. Worst of all, the movie doesn’t really engage much with all the moral questions the twist comes with. Fishburne’s character’s role in it feels half-baked, as does all the other characters’ response to the reveal. For all the painstaking build-up it got, the resolution to the big reveal comes remarkably fast. 

I think a lot about the twist would’ve worked better if the visual effects were stronger, but they aren’t. So many of the movies that “The Astronaut” takes inspiration from came out over thirty, forty years ago, and the sci-fi stuff in those films looks so much better than tit does here. I sympathize because “The Astronaut” is not a big-budget blockbuster, and at the Q&A session the creatives were upfront about not having big-budget money, but nonetheless the sci-fi VFX just looked too silly. The final act wants to tug at your heartstrings, but it’s simply too sauceless to pull the feat off.