U Are The Universe – Glasgow Film Festival 2025 Review
The near future. Andriy (Volodymyr Kravchuk) is an interspace junk man, whose job it is to take radioactive waste from Earth to Jupiter – a four year round trip. A lone wolf, Andriy is happy enough with those long periods of isolation. His sole company is jaunty robot Max (Leonid Pobadko), programmed to offer moral support in a way that usually manifests as stupid jokes.
Then the Earth explodes. Suddenly, Andriy has no home to go back to… until he hears a lone voice on the radio. Though Andriy’s own ship is not in a good way, and his supplies are running low, fellow astronaut Catherine (Alexia Depicker) is in an even worse state, trapped in a vessel slowly sinking into Saturn’s atmosphere, where it will burn up. With nothing to lose, and having fallen in love with Catherine during their long exchanges on the radio, he decides to go and try to rescue her.
Although it takes inspiration from just about every sci-fi classic there is, U Are The Universe, by Ukrainian writer-director Pavlo Ostrikov, is still very much its own thing. The film deftly navigates tonal swings from the silliest of comedy, to sweeping romance, to existential dread, to dramatic action, taking us on a voyage that feels suitably epic. Making it all the more impressive is that, while primary photography had almost wrapped when fighting broke out, Ostrikov and his crew had to navigate post-production in the face of Putin’s war on Ukraine. U Are The Universe is a very moving film on its own terms, but the context makes it even more so.
The only human face we see for 95% of the movie’s duration is that of Volodymyr Kravchuk. Known in Ukraine as a comedic TV actor, Kravchuk was relatively untested as a dramatic talent, yet you’d never know it from his performance, which is engaging and nuanced and deeply affecting. It’s no mean feat to carry a whole film without another human to play against, but Kravchuk makes Andriy’s emotional journey – from loner space cowboy, to interstellar romantic willing to cross galaxies to save the woman he loves – both believable and gripping.
While Kravchuk may not have another human to interact with, it would be remiss to overlook the company of Max the robot. Designed to cheer, but cursed with delivering the news of the apocalypse, he goes about it thusly: “I’ll try to say it in the funniest way possible: the earth has exploded!”. Space movies have featured their fair share of memorable robots, and Max would certainly be deserving of a place in the pantheon – his endearingly modest technology (he moves around via a track attached to the top of the spacecraft, and his eyes look like a 1980’s computerised kid’s toy – belying hidden depths.
All of us have limited time on this planet; it’s often only when we’re forced to confront that fact head on that we’re spurred to make a difference in our lives. In U Are The Universe, we watch a man high up in the stars stare down the abyss. And he’s smiling.
★★★★★
