Concrete Playground

Arduous employment, paranoia and fear of isolation are universal human experiences. In the grand tradition of social anxiety-steeped science fiction, Moon explores these experiences on a magnified scale: what if your job required you to oversee the mining of space minerals? What if you were completely alone on a space station for three years? What if your paranoia was accurate?

The film follows Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) in the last two weeks of his stint on the Sarang moon base, working for green energy company Lunar Industries. Following a crash in his moon-buggy, Bell awakes back on the base to discover that returning home to his wife and child might not be as straightforward as he’d been led to believe.

When a science fiction film is independently produced, intelligent, topical and suspenseful, as this one is, something has to give. In Moon’s case, it’s the character development. In a fifteen-minute time span, the slightly addled Bell we first meet transforms into a broken man, resigned to the seeming inevitability of his demise. However, we can forgive this, or even fail to notice it, as Rockwell manages to drive Bell’s physical and psychic deterioration to a mesmerizing, if slightly excruciating, level.