It’s impossible to make a terrible 90-minute movie. Lazy, cheap, embarrassing: Sure. But one and a half hours isn’t enough time to enrage you. Longer Netflix episodes go nowhere except the next SKIP INTRO. I.S.S. and Miller’s Girl might be two flavors of whatever, grayscale action and stay-after-class kinktease. I can only kinda recommend one of them. You could fit both together into a Batman sequel’s runtime, though, and live through zero speeches about hope.
Ariana DeBose headlines I.S.S. as Kira Foster, a new arrival at the International Space Station. She’s one of the three Americans breathing recycled air with three Russians. They share karaoke nights, zero-gravity liquor bubbles, some shipmance. “We don’t talk politics here,” Kira is told. Then, out the window, she notices megabombs toasting a whole hemisphere. Ground control sends a secret message to the Americans. Russia just started a war. “Take control of the I.S.S.,” they’re commanded, “By any means necessary.”
If the astronauts don’t strike, will the cosmonauts attack first? Outer-space claustrophobia has bottled Russian-American relations since Captain Kirk dueled Romulans. I.S.S. closes its own walls on trustworthy actors. John Gallagher Jr. and Chris Messina are Kira’s compatriots. (Messina + Mustache = Maximum Messina.) Solid TV types play the Russians: Pilou Asbæk from Game of Thrones, Costa Ronin from The Americans, Masha Mashkova from For All Mankind. Violence erupts suddenly, never from the person you’re expecting. Nick Shafir’s script allows heroes and villains from either country.
In real life, billionaires have ruined space ejaculating money rockets toward their grandkids’ lunar condos. Last decade’s whole Gravity-Interstellar-The Martian-Ad Astra vogue seems retro already, technical proficiency propping up human-spirit affirmation. I prefer 2017’s Life, a nasty high-fatality trip to, hello, the International Space Station.
I’m saying I.S.S. won’t work for anyone if it doesn’t work for me. Debose’s role has a particular energy: Whoops, I signed up for this before the Oscar. Forget her rousing West Side Story twirls, or even the stupefying commitment of her BAFTA granny rap. Kira’s the house bore. She claims a cheating ex-girlfriend made her a proud loner, yet only comes off friendly and helpful. The weightless effects are questionable. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite never nails the interior geography, so people just keep shock-appearing in hallways. Earth is a fireball, an impressively bleak backdrop spoiled by the suggestion that someone onboard has, like, cured radiation. Still, a couple brutalities stuck with me. I wish they’d called the movie Space Knives.
Miller’s Girl could be another regretful young star decision: Whoops, I signed up for this before the dance went viral. Even the protagonists almost rhyme. Kira, meet Cairo. But Jenna Ortega goes big in this sweatbox thriller as the May to Martin Freeman’s December. 18 and forgotten by her absent parents, Cairo Sweet (what a name!) lives alone in a VRBO-worthy Tennessee mansion. She watches black and white films, listens to the Gin Blossoms, reads voraciously, self-describes as “positively Gothic.” All on trend for a performer who made three horror hits and a Tim Burton show before the legal drinking age. This bored future valedictorian with a 4.6 GPA knows her Yale application needs more. Best friend Winnie (Gideon Adlon) suggests writing an essay about teacher-student blurred lines. In the same scene, Winnie says, “We’re the fucking American wet dream.” She also flirts with the school’s baseball coach (Bashir Salahuddin, always welcome), leading Cairo to sputter, “But you’re a lesbian!”
If Joe Eszterhas wrote lines like that, you’d tell him to get room by himself. First-time writer-director Jade Halley Bartlett dusts the lurid pulp with highbrow inclinations. Cairo becomes fascinated with her English teacher, Jonathan Miller (Freeman). She walks into his classroom, quotes his single unsuccessful book to him, inquires about Henry Miller. To this middle-aged never-was, Cairo looks doubly aspirational. She is Youth, all infinite horizons, and she is young, yowza. Miller’s Girl circles contemporary chatter around consent, age gaps, power imbalances. Jonathan makes many bad decisions. My honest reaction: Girl, him? Freeman’s sad-eyed indifference gets outgunned by Ortega’s dry-ice sizzle.
That’s one reason the middling drama tickles high camp. Winnie and Cairo come off like Reefer Madness for jailbait, just us gals caressing each other while we plot career-ending seductions. Every room is a giant bookcase. At one poetry reading I counted 15 lamps. The garish sensibility peaks with Dagmara Domińczyk, astounding as Jonathan’s wife Beatrice. Eons past her role might’ve been an executive ice queen, maybe a mom too domestic for her husband’s Michael Douglas-y lust. Beatrice swills booze taking 24-7 business calls work-from-homing in a lipstick-red bathrobe. She’s also the hornier partner, whose first reaction to Jonathan’s Cairo entanglement is smirkish arousal. I can’t remember another romantic third wheel who was too successful, too randy, and too funny for her husband.
Erotic thrillers were gourmet trash. Gothic so southern calls for inflated grandeur. So it’s a problem how this Tennessee seems less populated than the International Space Station. And a Hot Sensual Rainstorm looks like two people under a sprinkler. Still, Ortega makes another convincing case for her stardom. She has to play naïve, conniving, hurt, passionate, blasé. In a single close-up, Ortega shows you a young woman snuffing out her own humanity to burn brighter than ever. Miller’s Girl can be talky and thin, but at least it’s short and (Cairo) sweet. I’ll dream of a 75-minute director’s cut.