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IN THE opening sequence of the Swedish sci-fi film Aniara, a space elevator rises into low Earth orbit to meet an interplanetary cruiser, bound for new settlements on Mars. Earth, pillaged to destruction by humanity, is by now literally burning.

But the elevator turns out to be, well, a night bus. A tight focus on lead actor Emelie Jonsson, who plays Mimaroben, staring out of a misted-up window into the featureless dark, accentuates, rather than conceals, the lack of set. The interplanetary cruiser Aniara is a pretty decent piece of model work on the outside. Inside, it is a ferry.

Have writer-directors Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja turned out a film so low budget that they couldn’t afford sets? Have they been inept enough to reveal that fact in the first reel?

No, and no. On the contrary, Aniara is one of 2019’s smartest movies. The ship’s journey to Mars is primarily a retail opportunity. Buy some duty-free knits while your kids knock each other off plastic dinosaurs in the soft-play area. Have your picture taken with someone on the minimum wage dressed as a stupid bird. Don’t worry: in a real crisis, there’s always pitch and putt.

When the worst happens – colliding with space debris, Aniara is nudged off course into interstellar space – the lights flicker, someone trips on the stairs, a few passengers complain about the lack of information, and the hospitality crew work the mall bearing complimentary snacks.

“The moment we attain the future, it becomes now – not a place you go to for a frisson of wonder or horror”

“Transtellar Cruise Lines would like to apologize to passengers for the continuing delay to this flight. We are currently awaiting the loading of our complement of small lemon-soaked paper napkins for your comfort, refreshment and hygiene during the journey.”

Not Aniara, this, but a quotation from Douglas Adams’s radio tie-in novel The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, to which Aniara serves as a bleak twin. Don’t for a moment think that this is a film without humour. In one scene, the captain (played with pitch-perfect ghastliness by Arvin Kananian) reassures passengers that rescue is imminent while playing billiards. Balls and pockets, planets and gravity wells: it is every useless planetary mechanics lecture you may have suffered through. Watching it, you know everyone is doomed.

Not only will there be no rescue, it begins to dawn on our hero Mimaroben (a sort of ship’s counsellor armed with a telepathic entertainment system that, yes, kills itself) that there is no such thing as rescue. “You think Mars is paradise?” she scolds a passenger. “It’s cold.” Death is a waiting game, wherever you run.

Aniara is based on a sci-fi poem by Nobel prizewinner Harry Martinson. In a review of it, sci-fi writer Theodore Sturgeon said it “transcends panic and terror and even despair [and] leaves you in the quiet immensities”.

I don’t care how bleak it is. I’m sick of those oh-so-futuristic sci-fi films, with their scenarios that, however “dystopic”, are really only there to ravish the eye and numb the mind. Aniara gets the future right – it portrays it as though it were the present. When we finally build a space elevator, it will be like a bus. When we do fly to Mars, it will be indistinguishable from taking a ferry. The moment we attain the future, it becomes now, and now is not a place you go to for a frisson of wonder or horror. It is where you are stuck, trying to scrape together a meaning for it all.