Hey there everyone! Welcome back to Movie Soapbox, the little corner of the internet that only you and I and that guy sleeping in the corner over there know about. This is the place where we find underappreciated indie films and we make sense of them. Today? We are doing a deep dive on Approaching the Unknown, a movie so aggressively, almost violently committed to its own silences that by the time it ends you’re not sure if you watched a film about space exploration or a man dying alone in a desert while his brain ran one final, generous con on him.
Before we go any further, here’s the trailer. Watch it if you haven’t already, then come back.
Alright. Everything past this point is spoiler territory, all of it, including the ending, including the theory that reframes the entire film, including the question of whether anything you watched actually happened. If you haven’t seen it yet and you care about that kind of thing, go watch it and come back. For everyone else, let’s get into it.
Approaching the Unknown Movie Walkthrough
Mark Strong plays Captain William Stanaforth, a man so certain of his own capability that he takes an unproven water-generation device into a desert and tells himself he’ll either make it work or die in the attempt. That sentence alone should tell you everything you need to know about who this person is. He is not an astronaut in the NASA mold, the careful, committee-approved, backup-system-for-the-backup-system mold. He is a man whose entire psychology is organized around the premise that sheer will is a substitute for institutional support. He is the film’s argument and its tragedy, depending on which read you take.
He walks out of the desert having, apparently, successfully generated water from parched ground. NASA, or whatever this film’s version of a governmental space agency is, sees enough in him to attach him to a Mars mission. Rocket one carries Stanaforth and his water distiller. Rocket two carries the backup crew who will follow once he’s established the basics. One man, one piece of unproven technology, one extremely thin margin for error. Then, mid-journey, he makes a mistake. A back-flush contaminates his water reserves. The mission that was already operating on the thinnest possible engineering assumptions starts coming apart. Fixes work briefly, then fail. The secondary spacecraft turns back. Stanaforth keeps going, catching humidity from the cabin air, improvising, refusing. Mission Control tells him to turn around. He does not turn around. He records a monologue about dying in the desert, about that feeling of the universe opening up around him, about choosing a one-way trip to Mars over a mediocre life on Earth. The film ends.
Now. Before we get into what any of that means, there is something worth saying about what kind of film this is, and what it cost to exist in this form.
A film like this, one man, near-real-time, no action sequences, no villain, no relief valve, built entirely on the audience’s willingness to sit inside a single deteriorating psychology for ninety minutes, does not get made with studio money in 2016. It gets made because someone convinced a small pool of investors that Mark Strong at the top of a cast is worth the risk, and then the director, Mark Elijah Rosenberg, made the film he wanted to make before anyone could schedule a notes call. You can feel that in the pacing. There is no moment in this film where the tension has been artificially goosed to hold a restless audience, no scene that exists because a VP asked for something to happen. The restraint is total. That restraint is either the film’s greatest achievement or the thing that makes it genuinely difficult to sit through, and both of those things are true at the same time, and neither of them cancels the other out. What you’re watching is a film that survived the development process by largely avoiding it. The budget kept the suits out of the room. That is the only reason this version of this story exists.
So, what actually happened in this film? Because the mechanics matter before the meaning can land.
Stanaforth proves his water technology works in the desert. He launches. Mid-journey, he contaminates his water supply with a back-flush error. His reserves are now critically compromised. The second spacecraft, which had its own problems, turns back to Earth. Stanaforth is alone, past the point of easy return, running out of water, improvising collection methods that cannot realistically sustain him. Mission Control tells him to abort. He refuses. He delivers his monologue about why he came, chooses to continue to Mars, and the film ends before he arrives. Whether he arrives is left unresolved by design.
One mechanical note the source material flags correctly, and it’s worth addressing: the instruction to simply “turn around” in deep space is, from a physics standpoint, not how orbital mechanics work. A slingshot trajectory around Mars would be the more fuel-efficient return path. Whether this is a script error or a deliberate signal that Stanaforth is receiving instructions from people who don’t fully understand his situation, or that the whole thing is happening inside his head and his hallucinating brain generated a plausible-sounding but wrong command, is part of the interpretive question the film leaves open. File it away.
Now the theories. There are two real reads on this film, and they produce completely different movies depending on which one you accept.
Read One: It happened. Stanaforth made his technology work. He launched. He made a critical error. He ran out of water. He chose to continue anyway, consciously, as an act of self-determination, trading survival for a moment of genuine cosmic wonder. This is the film as a humanist document. The point is that a life lived cautiously, within safe margins, within institutional approval, is its own kind of dying. Stanaforth chooses the real thing over the managed version, even when the real thing kills him. The desert near-death experience cracked him open in a way he couldn’t close again, and Mars was the only direction that felt large enough to walk toward.
Read Two: None of it happened. Stanaforth takes his unproven technology into the desert. It does not work. He has no backup, no support, no margin. He begins to dehydrate. At some point in that process, his brain, doing what brains do when the body is shutting down, generates a complete and internally consistent hallucination of success. NASA validates him. He launches. The whole Mars journey, the water problems, the back-flush error, Mission Control, the second spacecraft, all of it is the elaborate dying-dream of a man alone in a desert with a broken machine. He dies there. He dies a failure. The movie is the story his mind told him so he didn’t have to know that.
Both reads are supported by the film’s text. The question is which one the film means.
Moviesoapbox’s Preferred Reading of the Movie Approaching the Unknown
I really think that the hallucination read is the correct one. And the detail that closes it for me is the one the source material surfaces: NASA, or any institutional space program operating in any version of reality, does not send a single human being into deep space with one unproven piece of technology and no redundant systems. The entire architecture of the mission as depicted is institutionally impossible. Real space programs are built on the premise that single points of failure are unacceptable. What Stanaforth describes, and what the film depicts, is a mission that no actual organization would approve. Which means the organization in this film is not behaving like a real organization. It is behaving the way Stanaforth would need it to behave inside his own head, validating him completely, structuring the whole enterprise around his singular genius, sending him off alone the way a man who believes he doesn’t need anyone else would design his own fantasy of recognition. The mission is the wish. The desert is the reality.
And that reframe makes the ending more devastating, not less. Stanaforth’s dying monologue about choosing wonder over a mediocre life is genuinely moving. The problem is it’s a story he’s telling himself while he dies in the sand having failed at the one thing he staked everything on. The moment of cosmic wonder he describes, that sensation of the universe opening up around him in the desert, that’s real. That happened. But instead of becoming the beginning of something, it became the last thing his mind replayed on the way out, inflated into a whole mythology of triumph. He didn’t choose Mars. He just died. The film just won’t say it plainly.
And here is what that costs the movie, because I’m not going to pretend the execution doesn’t matter. A film this committed to withholding, this reliant on a single performance in a near-static environment, needs to earn the audience’s patience with enough structural momentum to carry them to the revelation. Approaching the Unknown does not quite earn it. The pacing asks too much for too long before it pays out, and the ending, when it comes, is ambiguous in a way that reads less like deliberate craft and more like the film afraid to commit to its own bleakest implication. The hallucination read is the right read. The film should have had the nerve to make it undeniable.
Mark Strong does everything asked of him and then some. He holds the screen for ninety minutes of near-monologue in a confined space and makes Stanaforth legible, even sympathetic, even when the character’s defining trait is a pride so total it becomes a death sentence. That performance is the reason the film exists at all in any form worth discussing. Without it, this is a film school exercise. With it, it’s a flawed, genuinely interesting thing that almost nobody saw, made exactly the way its director intended, which is more than you can say for most of what’s sitting in your streaming queue right now.
A film about a man who dies alone in a desert because no institution would hand him the validation he needed, and whose brain rewrote that failure as a heroic sacrifice, barely got made and barely got seen. Meanwhile franchises with twelve producers and a committee of VPs are getting nine-figure budgets to strip-mine IP for the fourth consecutive year. That gap is the whole conversation. Stanaforth would understand it. He just wouldn’t turn around.