Jason Sondhi
It is common in shorts to imagine a formative moment in a young person’s life, an experience that represents a rupture or realization, where the innocence of childhood is supplanted with wisdom—or at least the hard-earned cynicism of adulthood. Disillusionment is often a key element in these stories, where a character’s faith in ideals, institutions, or individuals is revealed to be simplistic or naive. Jupiter, a handsome and celebrated short film from Germany, follows this path, but raises the stakes to life-or-death levels, crafting a taut thriller out of its young lead’s coming-of-age moment in a powerful story that its director, Benjamin Pfohl, would go on to adapt into a 2023 feature film.
Jupiter starts with a family traveling by car. It is raining fiercely, and the radio reports apocalyptic weather—a typhoon has struck the Philippines, and similar storms are set for the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. Whether it is connected or not, a comet is blazing past Earth on its way to Jupiter, and the largest planet of the solar system is, coincidentally enough, at a point closer to Earth than has ever been recorded. For the parents of Lea, a teenage girl in the backseat, this is their final confirmation: “It is coming for us.” We flashback to the beginning of the family’s journey that day, perceive the attention Lea’s young, special needs brother, Paul, requires, and follow the family to the compound in the Alps where they are to embark on a fateful, final voyage.
What works with Jupiter is its blending of styles. It is, in many ways, a thoughtful European drama, possessing beautiful cinematography that is attuned to the sensations and stimuli of its environment. While comparatively brief at 14min, it is ruminative in its pacing, supplying plenty of silence for viewers to ponder Lea’s interior conflicts, her silent screams to no one of, “this is wrong!” Yet, this style is attached to a genre concept of cults and apocalyptic visions. Turns out these two flavors go great together!
The weakness of the film is that the first two-thirds are telegraphed by the logline, so impatient, plot-centric viewers may chafe at Pfohl’s deliberateness in setting the scene. While recognizing this, I found pleasure in the unfolding of Lea’s arc—the lingering look at a cute boy at the gas station, the insinuation of period blood in the shower, all emphasizing how young she is still, just at the cusp of womanhood, deepening the sense of tragedy about what is to occur. The film is also thoughtful in its worldbuilding—the quiet, earnest moments between Lea and her parents, provide answers to how we got here—their assured manner as true believers, as well as Lea’s reserved doubts and her subsequent difficulty in expressing them.
This conflict is, indeed, the heart of the film. As Pfohl explained to us, his motivation with the short was to convey, “…the decisive moment in growing up when you question your parents’ worldview for the first time in your life,” connecting the thought to his experiences in church as a young iconoclast, finding it “…very unsettling how everyone around me followed the voice of the man at the front. How they all stood up or knelt down at the same time. How they all sang the same song or murmured the same words like a choir.”
Jupiter is a short we’ve admired for a long time, indeed, as mentioned, Pfohl managed to complete a well-received feature adaptation since it premiered on the festival circuit in 2019. That feature is available on Amazon in the US. Appreciation to Interfilm for facilitating our ability to present the short for you today!