Netflix's Stowaway Trailer Has Anna Kendrick Sabotaging a Mission to Mars

The newly released trailer for Netflix's science fiction outing, Stowaway, has Anna Kendrick and the rest of the crew facing an impossible decision while in deep space. The crew of a spaceship headed to Mars discovers an accidental stowaway shortly after take-off. Too far from Earth to turn back and with life support systems damaged and quickly dwindling, the ship's medical researcher (Anna Kendrick) emerges as the only dissenting voice against the group consensus that has already decided in favor of a grim outcome.

Featuring the kind of sinister edge, whispered conversations, and taut scripting that audiences have come to expect from movies set out in the deep, merciless void of space, Stowaway's minimalistic, claustrophobic setting looks to be bolstered by four stellar performances from Anna Kendrick, Daniel Dae Kim, Shamier Anderson, and Toni Collette, the only four actors who will appear in the movie.RELATED: Anna Kendrick Takes on Sci-Fi Thriller Stowaway

Directed by Joe Penna, whose feature film debut Arctic starring Mads Mikkelsen dealt with a lot of the same themes, Stowaway has been written by both Joe Penna and Ryan Morrison. The interstellar thriller stars Anna Kendrick as Zoe Levenson, the ship's medical researcher, Toni Collette as Marina Barnett, the ship commander, Daniel Dae Kim as Kim, the ship's biologist, and finally Shamier Anderson as Michael, the titular stowaway and launch plan engineer.

A movie likes Stowaway, which features four characters trapped together in isolation and grappling with unpresented circumstances, has clear comparisons with what has been going on in the real world for the past year, something which has not gone unnoticed by the cast. "The thing that feels really relevant is less the isolation of it and more that kind of problem-solving part of your brain that we were all engaging so vigorously in the first couple months of the pandemic," Kendrick said of the relevancy of Stowaway. "Just that constant problem-solving of, 'wait, okay, how do we fix this?' And just when it seems like you're onto something, there's some very obvious fundamental problem."

Collette, who plays the ship's commander, has also spoken in the past about how the movie may resonate with audiences and their experiences amid the ongoing global situation. "It's ultimately about community, survival, and sacrifice. Who can't relate to that at the moment?" Collette said of the parallels between reality and Stowaway. "I had never really read anything like it," Collette added at the time. "It is contained and the characters are confined but the questions posed, moral and otherwise, are vast and wide open."

Stowaway looks to be taking inspiration from other such perilous deep space-set adventures as Alien, Gravity, Life and Danny Boyle's Sunshine, with crew left alone to make a morally questionable decision that will have an impact on the whole of humanity. "Because [they] are so isolated, it forced the emotionality of what they undertake onto the actors. There was nothing else to lean on," Collette says of the dramatic events that take place within the confines of the ship.

Stowaway is due to be released by Netflix on April 22, 2021. You can watch the trailer over on Netflix's official YouTube channel.

Topics: Stowaway, Netflix, Streaming