Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Vesper’ on Hulu Is A Bleak But Hopeful Take On The Dystopian Future

The dystopian indie movie Vesper is making its way to Hulu this week, which means it will hopefully gain a wider audience than it did during its short-lived theatrical release in 2022. The film is as much a story about coming of age as it is about the struggle to survive against all odds. Faced with starvation and desperation, 13-year-old Vesper, played by British actress Raffiella Chapman, struggles to find new ways to keep herself and her father alive, and to keep her own hope alive, too.

VESPER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A title card explains that the world has been thrust into “the new dark ages” as a result of humanity’s attempts to prevent an ecological crisis with genetic modification. The result was a mass extinction of most plants, animals and humans, and now humans must rely on seeds provided to them for survival.

The Gist: Vesper is set in a dystopian time, an era of scarcity and bleakness set off by genetic engineering gone awry. Most people live in poverty, only subsisting on seeds provided by the powers that be located in wealthy cities called citadels, and these seeds have been engineered to produce only one harvest. Vesper (Chapman) is a 13-year-old girl who is a skilled bio-hacker who experiments on seeds and plants and hides her experiments from the world as she tries to perfect them. Abandoned by her mother who has joined a mysterious group called the Pilgrims who scavenge for she lives with her dying father, Darius (Richard Brake) who she keeps alive with a concoction of bacteria that she’s hooked up to a series of devices, and if she runs out of this bacteria he’ll die. (In this world, blood is harvested as currency, and Vesper’s experiments can sometimes veer into body horror, even though they’re not out to shock. At least not that much.)

In his human form, Darius is paralyzed, but his consciousness is attached to a floating drone that follows Vesper and he can speak to her through it.

Vesper lives near her cruel uncle, Darius’s brother Jonas (Eddie Marsan), a man who runs something of a culty commune where he breeds children for their blood, and creates “jugs” which are android-like beings made to look human and perform like servants. He’s the top dog in town, and is the only one with communication to the citadels, or with access to the seeds needed to survive.

Vesper encounters a young woman named Camellia (Rosy McEwen), a wealthy resident of a citadel, whose airship has crashed. Camellia’s father, Elias, was the other passenger aboard and Camellia promises to bring Vesper to the citadel if she can help locate her father, but when Vesper finally locates the man and his ship, Jonas gets to him first and kills him, partially to scavenge the parts off his ship and partially on principle: eat the rich and all that. Vesper realizes that Camellia isn’t safe as long as Jonas knows she’s somewhere nearby.

Vesper hides Camellia in her home, and as they spend time together they become friends, but soon Vesper learns Camellia is actually a jug, albeit an intelligent, sentient one – a Cylon, basically – who was created by her “father” Elias. This type of jug is illegal, and Camellia and her father, it turns out, were absconding from their citadel in search of a safer place, and she’s on the run. But Vesper learns Camellia holds the secret to unlocking a genetic code within the seeds that make them more fruitful than before. With these newly modified seeds, Vesper now holds the power to feed her family and then some, but in the process, she still has to find a way to escape Jonas, protect Camellia, and come to terms with the fact that if she leaves her family home, she must also leave her father behind.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Me: “This movie was like if Guillermo del Toro made The Hunger Games.” My husband: “It was like a PG-13 body horror Cronenberg meets the visual style of Jean-Pierre Jeunet.”

Our Take: As dystopian futures go, Vesper has notes of The Hunger Games (the citadels, though we never really see inside them, seem very reminiscent of Panem’s Capitol, but it’s implied that only the wealthiest people can enjoy life inside them while the rest of the world starves), but rather than focusing on a gruesome fight to the death, Vesper, though dark at times, has an overall hopeful note to it. As Vesper, Raffiella Chapman is loyal and kind and smart, all the things you want your protagonist to be, but she’s young, and even though the world around her is hard (her uncle wants her to become one of the “breeders” in his cult, her mother left her, her father is dying), she refuses to stop experimenting, searching, hoping for a better way.

After she meets Camellia, the two bond and though Vesper is programmed to view jugs as unnatural, she doesn’t let her prejudices linger and instead she realizes that, ironically, the non-human Camellia offers her the one thing she lacks in her life, a touch of humanity, a friend she can truly love and rely on. While Vesper at first seems like it might be a statement about humankind’s carelessness with the environment, it’s less about that and more about the essentials we truly need for survival. Seeds, like people, need to be nurtured in order to thrive.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Vesper, having abandoned her home with nothing but the seeds she has re-engineered, arrives at the site where the Pilgrims (her mother possibly among them) have decamped. Everything they scavenge, it turns out, has been used to create a massive tower, taller than even the highest trees in the forest. Vesper climbs the tower: to one side, she sees the gleaming citadel. To the other, open fields. She pulls her seeds from her pocket and releases them onto the wind.

Sleeper Star: Eddie Marsan has always been a successful “that guy” character actor, making memorable supporting appearances in films like The World’s End, V For Vendetta, and Gangs of New York, but he is truly menacing and memorable as Jonas, Vesper’s cruel and vicious uncle.

Most Pilot-y Line: “Vermin have brains too,” Darius tells Camellia when she seems impressed by all the synthetic biological inventions Vesper has made.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Sure, Vesper is another movie depicting a bleak hellscape of a not-so-distant future, but the film contains some great performances, an original story, and shimmering visuals (including some gross-out moments) keep things interesting all the way through.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.