Stowaway review: Netflix’s starry sci-fi defies expectations – to a point

Anna Kendrick and Toni Collette are on a two-year mission to Mars gone wrong in this take on the ‘trolley problem’ set in space

Dir Joe Penna. Starring: Anna Kendrick, Toni Collette, Daniel Dae Kim, Shamier Anderson. Cert 12, 116 minutes

A pool of blood beneath a spaceship’s air vent is the single, provocative image that kicks off Netflix’s Stowaway. But there are no bloodthirsty, intergalactic beasties stalking these halls or bursting out of people’s chests. Joe Penna’s follow-up to his 2018 survival-driven debut Arctic, starring Mads Mikkelsen, defies expectations of the sci-fi genre – to a point. The blood in question belongs to Michael (Shamier Anderson), an engineer who’s knocked unconscious during the launch and wakes up several hundred miles from planet Earth, far away from the younger sister he’s devoted his life to caring for.

The crew on board – medical researcher Zoe (Anna Kendrick), biologist David (Daniel Dae Kim), and captain Marina (Toni Collette) – are on a two-year mission to Mars, carrying out research that would eventually allow humans to colonise the planet. No one knows quite what happened to Michael, but he makes himself useful anyway, having always harboured dreams of space travel. Their makeshift utopia is short-lived. Marina, to her horror, realises the CDRA – which sucks up carbon dioxide and keeps the air supply in balance – is damaged beyond repair.

Penna and Ryan Morrison, who co-wrote the scripts for both Stowaway and Arctic, insert a narrative convenience that isn’t entirely implausible: the ship’s depleted oxygen supply can only keep three crew members alive for the rest of the journey. Zoe is determined to find a solution. Ground control insists that all options have been exhausted. It’s a narrative twist that shifts Stowaway from the usual, adrenaline-laced world of space thrillers, and the film’s even set far enough in the future that the characters don’t have to deal with zero gravity. Instead, we’re offered a kind of morality play, as four individuals wrestle with the value placed on a single human life.

Michael’s not the one who can keep the crew safe or complete the mission. Does that make him expendable? At its core, Stowaway works as a glossy, high-concept version of the “trolley problem”, which asks whether you’d stop a runaway trolley from hitting five people by pulling a lever and diverting it onto a track where it’d kill one person instead. It’s all tremendously acted by a cast who know to keep their emotions grounded at the level of domestic drama, wearing this impossible choice as a badge of their own fallible humanity. Collette, who makes rare use of her native Australian accent, is especially good. There’s a hardness to her performance that speaks not to cruelty, but to a knowledge that the price of leadership is often some small chunk of humanity.

Stowaway slowly backs its characters into a moral corner, forcing them towards a final, terrible decision. And then it stumbles, suddenly. Perhaps Penna and Morrison are too enraptured by the profound hopefulness that drives Gravity, The Martian, and so many other films that deal with space travel. In the end, they bypass all thorny conclusions and side with ingenuity and nobility. It’s easy to write a hero – but what if Stowaway had kept its human being as human beings?