{"id":678364,"date":"2026-05-18T09:50:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T09:50:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/678364\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T09:50:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T09:50:08","slug":"voidance-review-very-british-sci-fi-movie-is-like-miss-marple-with-a-space-blaster-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/678364\/","title":{"rendered":"Voidance review \u2013 very British sci-fi movie is like Miss Marple with a space blaster | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Its eyes and aspirations eternally bigger than its budget and reach, this British sci-fi film provides the answer to an unlikely question: what if someone remade 2011\u2019s Source Code<\/a> in a rundown outpost of Wetherspoon\u2019s? Amid reported unrest between neighbouring planets Atopia and Cho-Hacha, mumsy anti-terror agent Alana Toro (Zoe Cunningham) receives orders from a hologrammatic James Cosmo to track down and bring in a troublesome rebel group. Her mission stalls, however, when she walks into a bar for interstellar truckers, where the film\u2019s horizons shrink and \u2013 thanks to a time-loop device \u2013 our heroine gets several goes at interrogating the same skeleton crew of patrons and trying to resolve a convoluted and stubbornly uninvolving murder mystery.<\/p>\n

Along the way, flickers of B-movie ingenuity and invention catch the eye. The grimy, greasy set design (courtesy of Jamie Foote) conceals some of the budgetary limitations, meaning that this is a rare modern sci-fi that inhabits a palpably physical, non-pixellated space. Costume designer Ci\u00e9ranne Kennedy Bell clearly had immense fun dressing this troupe in the sort of cyberpunk finery that is a crossover between Red Dwarf and Claire\u2019s Accessories. The score, by Christoph Allerstorfer and James Griffiths, is that of a far more expansive and assured production. Alana herself is a promising pulp creation \u2013 a leather-clad, purple-wigged Miss Marple who gets to pull out a space blaster every now and again \u2013 even if Cunningham, with her air of a school secretary who\u2019s just uncovered a tuck shop scam, seems more than faintly miscast.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The problems that torpedo the film are evident \u2013 and it\u2019s not just the title, with its unfortunate intestinal ring. The setup entails a lot of deeply clunky expositional dialogue and the time-loop conceit just doesn\u2019t work. It is all reliant on a repeated PA announcement that reaches \u201csee it, say it, sorted\u201d<\/a> levels of annoyance, and a wristwatch that keeps having to spell out what the direction doesn\u2019t always make clear. A very British vision of the future, all told: cramped, impoverished and something of a drag.<\/p>\n

Voidance is on digital platforms from 25 May.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Its eyes and aspirations eternally bigger than its budget and reach, this British sci-fi film provides the answer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":678365,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[64,63,134,344],"class_list":["post-678364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/678365"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}