A Film Canon

The Astronaut's Wife takes a classic trope of body horror - the horror of pregnancy, of having another source of consciousness within your own body - and uses it to imagine a war film for an era in which "the battlefield is a blizzard...a transparent electronic blizzard." While on a routine mission, astronaut Spencer Armacost (Johnny Depp) loses contact with NASA for two minutes. Upon his return, his wife, Jillian (Charlize Theron) quickly falls pregnant, and begins to sense that something about him has changed - or, rather, she begins to apprehend something through her womb, something related to Spencer's sudden and suspicious career change from astronaut to military technician, as he drags her from Florida to New York to work on a cutting-edge fighter plane that "doesn't drop bombs", but just "sends out a signal...like the voice of God...that turns everything off." The whole film plays as an effort to capture this signal, which eludes any one human sensory-organ, and so can only be evoked through exquisite sensory thresholds, all of which yearn for a time before the sensory division of labour; gestation as a caressing, liquified radio. It's a vision both of the womb as a transmitter, and of the next stage of war as invasion by transmission - as if the alien in Alien had remained a radio signal - fusing live burial and live birth into Jillian's recurrent fear of being "buried by sky". If it frequently feels atonal, or shot out of sequence, it doesn't really matter either, since it contributes to just this amniotic, zero-gravity ambience, which beautifully envisages New York as a distantly orbiting space station, the threshold at which cinematography shimmers into coronagraphy.