SlingsH๏τ is a 2024 psychological thriller movie that uses hallucinations to question reality and make you and the characters unsure of what’s happening and what’s an illusion. The science fiction thriller genre offers a wealth of unsettling, probing, and often confusing movies to choose from. Add in a splash of psychological horror, and the mind-bending stories become even harder to decipher with only one watch. SlingsH๏τ starts the questions early and keeps them coming, with John’s (Casey Affleck) hallucinations as the key to the puzzle.
While the story in SlingsH๏τ can be a bit predictable, and it does sometimes feel like karaoke of better science fiction movies, SlingsH๏τ does sport an impressive cast, including Affleck and Laurence Fishburne as Captain Franks. With this cast, SlingsH๏τ follows a space voyage. The crew of Franks, John, and Nash (Tomer Capone) are on their way to тιтan, Saturn’s largest moon, to transport vital methane. The multi-year journey requires the crew to hibernate for periods, but when they wake up, they experience strange side effects. John’s includes strange hallucinations.
Why Does John Have Hallucinations In SlingsH๏τ?
John Takes Drugs To Hibernate For 90 Days
While on their journey, the astronauts are put to sleep for months so that they don’t have to experience the tedium of years of space travel. However, every 90 days, the crew awakens in order to make sure the systems are all still working. Every time the astronauts awake, however, they experience side effects from the drugs used to put them to sleep. Each one struggles with the side effects, but only John experiences hallucinations. These hallucinations become increasingly bizarre and real, making it difficult for him to separate reality from delusion.
John has hallucinations of Zoe (Emily Beecham), his girlfriend, back on Earth. He has visions of their introduction at a work conference and other key moments in their relationship, including the time he rejected her love because of his dedication to the Saturn mission. Franks tries to convince John that the “Zoe” he knows is a woman employed by the space agency as a way to test his dedication to the strenuous mission. In part driven by his hallucinations, John attacks Franks and accesses his files to find the truth.
John’s Hallucinations Convince Him He’s Not Alone On The Ship
Frank And Nash Are Revealed To Be Illusions
Through researching his files, John stumbles across the big twist in the movie: he is the only one listed on the crew log. Franks and Nash were figments of his imagination. His full name is Captain John Nash Franks. Though he realized that his hallucinations of Zoe were fake, John had no idea that Franks and Nash weren’t real. He even saw Franks kill Nash, suggesting just how powerful these hallucinations have been. John has essentially been dreaming inside a dream. These hallucinations have all created the illusion that John is not alone on his space voyage.
He’s in such a disturbed state, even the people he creates in his head don’t have his best interests at heart.
Despite being asleep for most of the journey, John is still spending years alone, and he’s awake for parts of it. This has clearly caused some kind of longing in his mind for companionship, and the drugs he’s been taking have created the perfect opportunity for this subconscious mind to start believing in things that aren’t there. The fact that he doesn’t even get along with the hallucinations his mind creates suggests the turmoil going on inside his head. He’s in such a disturbed state, even the people he creates in his head don’t have his best interests at heart.
The Audience And John Have To Decide Which Hallucinations To Listen To At The End
Zoe And Franks Fight To Save Or Kill John
Even after it’s revealed that John is alone, there is still one more twist to come. The hallucinations don’t stop just because John has become wise to them, but he now has to figure out what is real and what’s not. That’s when he gets a call from Zoe, who claims she is his girlfriend and has important news for him. John is not in space. He’s underground in a facility where the space agency is testing drugs and isolation on John to determine if he can handle the trip to Saturn, just as he’s agreed to do, but he can no longer remember.
Zoe tells John that an earthquake has collapsed the facility, so he needs to climb out of the escape hatch in order to reach the rescue team. That escape hatch, which he thought would lead to space, apparently leads back out of the underground facility. As he climbs the ladder to reach the door, John has another vivid vision of Franks. Franks tells John that Zoe is also a hallucination, and he is indeed in space. He yells at John to focus on the mission, but it’s too late.
John opens the latch and for one brief moment sees the cave, and then he’s sucked out into space. Zoe, or at least her phone call, was also a hallucination, and John is ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. Production designer Barry Chusid had to create a spaceship that would confuse audiences and make them question if they were seeing a real spacecraft or if it was something created by an agency for testing purposes. Chusid said (via IndieWire),
“I drew it both ways: as a ship in space and as he’s underground. And I went in a totally literal way. If this is the way it is, this is what it would look like. And I just followed it in a very pragmatic, familiar way, because I’m trying to always ask myself how can I [relay] this so that the audience is going to say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s what it would be’.”
Chusid’s set makes it difficult for us to know what’s real. It does look like a spacecraft, and we’ve been led to believe as much, but there’s also something fake about it. So, when John reaches for the vault door, there is a moment where the audience thinks it could very well open to the underground facility.
SlingsH๏τ’s Ending Deals With Loneliness And Reality
John Creates A World To Escape The Tedium Of His Real One
SlingsH๏τ is a film about loneliness and what happens when we’re put in a situation that requires solitude. A journey to Saturn is more solitude than most people would ever experience, but plenty of real people have dealt with the pain and boredom of being alone for long periods of time. Some of us talk to ourselves, some of us lean into work, some of us reflect on the past, often on our mistakes. John does all these things, and none of them are healthy.
Solitude can be dangerous for those who are unequipped to handle so much time alone.
Solitude can be dangerous for those who are unequipped to handle so much time alone. The quiet can become deafening, and what you choose to replace nothing with can then be harmful. John replaces his alone time with Zoe, but this turns out to be his undoing when she becomes a hallucination. He so wants to be with her, or at least so wants to have someone with him instead of focusing on the mission as the hallucination of Franks urges him, that he imagines a way to be with her immediately.
The tragedy of SlingsH๏τ comes from John no longer being able to distinguish the real from the unreal. He’s been so alone and desperate for companionship that he’s created a world that’s not real and doesn’t follow the rules of the actual world. When his fake world doesn’t follow the rules, that’s where the danger comes in.
