Cultural researcher, content editor, and film critic at Portfolio Magazine. Has lived and breathed cinema from a young age and lives as someone who writes to find meaning.
One of the most moving, profound, sweet films awaiting us this year at the Utopia Festival, in my opinion, is the film by Ukrainian director Pavlo Ostrikov, U Are The Universe. Admittedly, it is a science fiction film that features all the expectable tropes: space, spaceships, disasters, and even a robot with artificial intelligence (of course). However, it does not use genre motifs to create a universe, but rather to cleanse it of them. Just before it becomes an apocalyptic or dystopian portrait, in that split second, human, philosophical, and cinematic magic takes place in relation to human longing and its connection to the vast cosmic space and the material earth of planet earth.
The film’s protagonist is Andrei, who is either an astronaut or a celebrated driver of a zero-gravity garbage spacecraft. His job is routine and technical. In other words: boring. He is a blue-collar worker. His only partner in this dreary job is Maxim the robot, who never stops reminding him of what is obvious, irritating him, bothering him—and sometimes even cracking unfunny jokes. But as the film progresses, the signification of this character is clarified: Maxim acts as a cinematic “buddy,” only in this role, Andrei has no friend by his side, only a poor imitation of one: humor that highlights loneliness rather than filling it, and a somewhat caustic representation of relationships between man and chatGPT.
Andrei is a misanthrope, whom even the distance of space cannot sufficiently distance from the human race. Suddenly, the Earth is destroyed, exploding right before his eyes. In an instant, not only the planet and the life on it collapse, but also the very idea of having a place to return to.
Andrei is not very shaken by it; he seems more interested in making the most of his remaining time on the spaceshift and doing his best. Even when there is no, well, best. Food rationing? What difference does it make, one month more, one month less. Energy? It would be better spent on something other than oxygen. Utilitarianism? Nah. Why? When utter hopelessness meets a man who has long since despised the concept, not much can happen. There is only simple acceptance.
But then something happens. Andrei discovers that he is not the last person alive. Through a distant communication channel, he makes contact with a woman named Catherine, a French astronaut staying by herself at a distant station. Another human trace, distant but real. They form a connection, which exists solely through voice and speech, without image, touch, or promise for the future. After all, there is no future.
It is precisely this reduction, the choice to keep the connection at the level of the voice alone, that makes it particularly intimate and creates a kind of reverse mirror of the way we consume media today. There is no gaze, no body language, no image through which one can fantasize a lot and gain little. Only voice, breath, small silences. It is a minimal, almost technical human connection, but one that holds extraordinary emotional power. Not as a promise, nor as the beginning of another story. Only an existence born out of emptiness.
This is not necessarily the beginning of a romance, nor is it a message for the sake of humanity. It is a connection that grows in an environment where the world has already collapsed and there is no going back. And yet something in Andrei moves, defrosting his heart. Amidst nothingness, loss, and lack, he rediscovers the longing he once dismissed- the need for another human being.
Instead of asking how to save humanity, the film asks a much more modest- perhaps crueler question: What remains of human connection when the future ceases to be a possibility? And what would even the greatest misanthrope be willing to sacrifice for the slim chance of touching, connecting with the “other”- the last other.
There is something fundamental in the use of The Universe in science fiction as a tool for reduction rather than expansion or flooding with effects. In an era when the genre is flooded with conceptual excessiveness, formulaic spectacles, bombastic solutions, and apocalypses that occur once a week, Ostrikov’s work moves in the opposite direction: he peels away the layers instead of adding to them. There is no mythology construction, no collective consciousness to save, no inflated futuristic vision. Space is not a place of promise, and technology is not a bridge but a maintenance framework that maintains life on the edge. Right on the edge. The result is a stubborn and profound science fiction that places a lone individual in front of what remains when the idea of “tomorrow” has been emptied of content.
In this sense, U Are The Universe is revealed as a distinctly existentialist work of art that prioritizes the present over the future. Andrei is not just “the last man”; he is a reflection of the contemporary viewer. Like many, he is isolated but functional, surrounded by screens and streams of information, watching the world collapse from a seemingly safe distance. The destruction does not shock him because it has already taken place in his mind. Thus, the film speaks to an era in which the longing for connection exists but does not necessarily lead to change, correction, or a clear destination. It is a longing that exists for the sake of longing itself, not as a mechanism of redemption.
Despair gives way to courage, the aversion from humanity is replaced by love, and the desire to make the most of the time that remains turns into an understanding that what remains must be exhausted. This seemingly modest film stirs an emotional quake, causing the stoic and tough protagonist to evoke rare empathy. The more modest the film’s intentions are, the more the heart shrinks and goes out to its protagonist.
It is a delicate, modest but impressive film that manages to transform cosmic silence into an inner reflection of human loneliness. In its most beautiful moments, the empty space is perceived as the space of the soul; and the big questions about the expanding universe become questions about the heart, which seems to be moving in the opposite direction.
U Are the Universe is not a film about the end of humanity, but about what remains of the human when there is nothing left to wait for. No redemption, no future, no vision – just one voice that continues to speak to another voice in vacuum.
In this sense, U Are the Universe does not look towards space. It looks at the viewer and asks how much he too has learned to live with a human hunger for something distant – a low, faint sound that becomes an entire universe and much beyond in an instant. How much has he given up, and how much is he willing – even if he cannot admit it – to try again.