Vesper–Guillermo del Toro fantasy meets Luc Besson sci-fi in new dystopian film

If you thought that dystopian science fiction had exhausted itself, a new mash-up of future dreary and fantasy may change your mind. Vesper is an independent project coming this month from IFC Films, and it looks like it could have been the product of some of cinema’s master genre auteurs. It takes place in post-environmental collapse Earth, making it science fiction with imagery in its trailer reminiscent of Luc Besson. But it’s also fantasy, with the visual imagination of Hayao Miyazaki, and it’s the brand of darker fantasy that looks like it could have been created by Guillermo del Toro. And it has a plot that sounds like A Boy and His Dog meets His Dark Materials.

From Lithuanian director Kristina Buozyte and French writer-director Bruno Samper, Vesper stars 13-year-old Raffiella Chapman (His Dark Materials, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children) as Vesper, a young teenage survivor, experimenting with seeds as her ailing father accompanies her from his bed via a drone (that looks oddly like the volleyball from Cast Away). Her uncle is played by genre movie familiar Eddie Marsan (the Cornetto trilogy, Sherlock Holmes, Deadpool 2). And there may be zombies who aren’t really zombies.