The Astronaut is a 2025 science fiction horror film written and directed by Jess Varley in her feature debut, running 91 minutes and released by Vertical after premiering at SXSW. It stars Kate Mara as Sam Walker, a NASA astronaut who crash-lands back on Earth after her shuttle is struck by debris, alongside Laurence Fishburne as General William Harris, Gabriel Luna as her husband Mark, and Ivana Miličević. Placed in a high-security safe house for observation and medical testing, Sam begins experiencing phenomena that convince her something extraterrestrial followed her home.

I want to start with the precise moment my hope for this film died, because it happened early and it never recovered. At one point, Sam attempts to secure a door by dragging a table in front of it. A sliding door. A door whose entire function is to move sideways along a track. A table placed in front of it accomplishes nothing whatsoever, and yet the film presents this as a character taking decisive action. Once a film loses you on something that basic, every subsequent request for your trust becomes considerably harder to grant.

The bulk of the runtime is Sam alone in a large modern house, frightened that an invisible presence is stalking her. The first hour commits almost entirely to the familiar "is this real or is she losing her mind" structure, which in practice amounts to a long sequence of false alarms, security shutters activating, and jump scares that consistently turn out to be nothing. Other reviewers landed in the same place, with one describing that stretch as a boring slog of fake jump scares, and I would not argue with a word of it.

Then comes the twist, and it is where my genuine frustration lives. Sam is not being hunted by an alien. Sam is the alien. Her human body deteriorates to reveal her true form, and the entities pursuing her turn out to be her real family, arriving to bring her home. She bids farewell to her Earth family and departs on their ship as soldiers close in.

Here is my objection, and I think it is a fair one. When these beings finally make contact with Sam, they gently touch her cheek and ask whether she can understand them. Gently. Calmly. Communicatively. Which means they possessed the ability to simply talk to her the entire time. They could have led with that. A straightforward "hello, you are actually one of us, apologies for the confusion" would have resolved this film in its opening act and saved everyone involved an hour and a half. Instead they elected to lurk invisibly around a house, triggering alarms and terrorising someone they came to rescue. The film's entire tension rests on characters choosing, for no stated reason, the least efficient possible approach. Critics flagged the same sequence, with one describing the moment as bargain-bin CGI aliens turning up to explain the plot through telepathy.