SPOILER ALERT!
'Be thankful for your greasepaint clown, if loneliness wears the crown of the Veteran Cosmic Rocker'
~ The Moody Blues
That old '80s lyric came to mind while watching Adam Sandler in Spaceman. The song captures something of his career arc: a performer known for clowning but with the depth and talent to go beyond the funny guy persona.
This soul-searching film has little in the way of humor. The only faint and probably unintended exception might be the design of the spider alien, which struck me as slightly awkward around the head. But then again, it’s an alien—why should it look like anything I expect?
Six months into his solitary, year-long mission to study the mysterious Chopra cloud beyond Jupiter, Czech astronaut Jakub Procházka (Adam Sandler) finds himself consumed less by the wonders of space than by its crushing loneliness. His isolation deepens as communication dwindles with his pregnant wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan), back on Earth.
Unbeknownst to him, Lenka has reached her breaking point, exhausted by years of physical and emotional absence. She sends a "Dear John" message to her husband through the high-tech Czech Connect—a message Commissioner Tuma (Isabella Rossellini) chooses to withhold, fearing news of Lenka leaving the marriage would devastate Jakub and compromise the mission.
As Jakub’s mind begins to fray in his extended isolation, a colossal, ancient, telepathic arachnid named Hanuš (voiced by Paul Dano) materializes inside his ship. A refugee from a dying world, Hanuš is fascinated by humanity’s struggle with loneliness. Acting as an unlikely and somewhat aggressive therapist, he compels Jakub to confront the selfishness and neglect that have shaped his life and hollowed out his marriage. Their exchanges push Jakub toward painful self-recognition as he nears the Chopra cloud, a strange cosmic remnant said to hold all of time at once—and perhaps the key to a psycho-spiritual awakening.
Meanwhile, Carey Mulligan is every bit as compelling here as she was as the self-centered Isabella Thorpe in Northanger Abbey. In Spaceman, she gives Lenka a quiet gravity, embodying the devastation of abandonment with such restraint that her pain feels immediate, even across the gulf separating Earth and the outer planets.
In the end, Spaceman isn’t about dazzling visuals or high-stakes adventure. It’s about the silence between souls, the invisible distances that can open up even in the closest relationships, and the painful work of facing them. Sandler and Mulligan bring surprising depth to that theme, and the film ultimately suggests that even across vast distances—whether measured in miles or in hearts—love can still find its way back.
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