Comets Review: Sascha Geneen and the art of staring at the sky

You should probably watch Comets if you’re the type of person who finds old film grain actually comforting. It’s a movie for people who don’t mind when nothing happens for ten minutes as long as the lighting looks right.

If you need a plot that moves fast or characters who explain their feelings out loud, you will absolutely hate this. It is basically the opposite of a blockbuster.

Sascha Geneen is the main reason to even pull this out of the archives. She has this way of looking at the camera that makes you feel like she’s keeping a secret from the director.

The story is pretty thin, honestly. It’s mostly just people in a small house waiting for a comet to pass by, but they seem more worried about their own dinner plans than the end of the world.

I kept thinking about Morphium while watching this, mostly because of how the shadows seem to swallow the actors. But where that movie feels heavy, Comets feels like it might just float away if you stop watching it.

There is this one scene in a library that I can't stop thinking about. The camera just stays on a stack of books while you hear a door creak in the distance.

It goes on for way too long. I actually checked to see if my player had frozen, but then a tiny bit of dust drifted across the lens.

It’s a bold choice to make a movie this quiet. It reminded me a bit of the pacing in The Victory of Virtue, but without all the moralizing.

The male lead—I don’t even know his name—has this very awkward way of standing. He always looks like he’s leaning slightly to the left, like one of his legs is shorter than the other.

He doesn't have much to do besides look worried. Geneen does all the heavy lifting with just her eyebrows.

The Small Stuff I Noticed

• There is a cat that walks across a table in the background of the kitchen scene. It clearly wasn't supposed to be there because a hand reaches out from off-screen to grab it.
• The wallpaper in the main bedroom is incredibly ugly. It looks like dying ferns.
• One of the actors has a mustache that looks like it’s about to fall off in the humidity.
• The music is just a single piano note that repeats when someone looks out a window. It’s a bit much.

I wonder if the director was trying to make a point about how boring the apocalypse would actually be. We all think it’ll be explosions, but maybe it’s just waiting in a dusty room for a light in the sky.

The film quality is pretty rough in spots. There are these long white scratches that look like actual comets, which is probably a coincidence but it looks cool anyway.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of Comets (1930) through its definitive frames.

It’s much more of a mood piece than something like Sherlock Sleuth. You don't watch this to solve a puzzle; you watch it to feel a certain kind of sadness.

"The sky doesn't care if we're looking or not."

That’s a line from the intertitles that stuck with me. It’s simple, but in the middle of all that silence, it feels like a gut punch.

There is a scene where they are eating soup and the sound of the spoons hitting the bowls is the loudest thing in the movie. It’s almost annoying how loud it is compared to the rest of the film.

I think the movie gets better once you realize it isn't going to give you a big ending. It just sort of... stops.

It’s like the film ran out of money or the actors just went home. But strangely, it works for this kind of story.

If you’ve seen Angst - Die schwache Stunde einer Frau, you know how these old dramas can get under your skin. Comets isn't quite that intense, but it has a similar way of making you feel lonely.

I noticed a smudge on the lens during the big telescope scene. It looks like a thumbprint right in the middle of the stars.

It’s kind of funny that a movie about the vastness of space is ruined by someone’s oily finger. But that’s why I like these old movies; they feel human and messy.

The way Sascha Geneen holds her teacup is so stiff. You can tell she was trained in theater because she poses even when she's just sitting there.

Is it a masterpiece? Probably not. It’s too uneven for that.

But it’s definitely something I’ll remember more than the last five things I saw on Netflix. It has a specific texture that you can't fake with digital filters.

I’d say give it a chance on a rainy Tuesday night. Just don't expect it to explain itself to you. ☄️