SXSW '25: The Infinite Husk: A sci-fi feature too cynical for its own good

In Aaron Silverstein’s debut feature, being a human is akin to a prison: a meaningless, dreadful experience doomed to end in a grim death. The Infinite Husk, which premiered at SXSW this year, falters under the weight of its big philosophical ambitions, leaning too far into the pessimism of the human condition without actually exploring what it means to live and move through the world’s structures. Then, it chooses to tack on an unearned ending that seeks to rewrite the ideas it spent its runtime piecing together. While the visual effects and editing are well done, its unjustifiably cynical tone is what lingers long after the film ends. 

Peace Ikediuba leads the film as Vel, a disembodied alien consciousness cast into the body of a recently deceased human being on Earth. She’s been exiled from her home planet, and in order to return, must gather information on the research being conducted by another member of her kind also exiled to Earth (named Mauro), which seems to pose a threat to the folks back home if completed. It’s in this effort that Vel may learn something about the meaning of human life, but makes no attempts to do so. 

Vel lies on the bathroom floor, calmly staring at the ceiling. Credit: Director of Photography

By the time Vel meets her espionage target, she’s interacted with just two people. Both are men who engage in misogynoir, one in a bar and the other in a corner store. The angle of examining racism through the lens of an alien who inhabits the body of a marginalized person in society could be compelling, but the film doesn’t engage with this enough to extract meaning for Vel, just treated as passing moments to validate her pre-notioned pessimism. 

But even well before then, Vel’s voiceover condemns the human experience as something devoid of value, or beauty. So when she finally meets Mauro (Circus-Szalewski) and joins him for a cup of coffee at his home, he quickly reaffirms the assumptions she’s made so far, coloring her view with even more nihilism and negativity. 

Vel and Mauro’s conversations about creating new realities for humans via the notation of their native language become meaningless when there’s no applied use for this expansion for humanity, and all hope and grace is given to an alien population that prohibits the study of time or language. By their accounts, everything is so much better and bigger and limitless where they come from. But they can be banished from their world to another form of existence for studying baseline concepts of life and communication, which seems oppressive and limiting, just in ways different from our own world, making their judgements seem even more unwarranted. 

The ideas presented in The Infinite Husk about reality existing within the confines of any given consciousness are compelling on a surface level, until opportunities for further examination come forth. By the film’s own basis, reality is determined by any one person’s consciousness, which can be changed depending on one’s way of thinking. This leads the two lead characters to work together on translating their spoken language into a written one, which would vaguely allow humans to gain new capacity for understanding the universe. However, when you apply this theory to the characters themselves, any tangible meaning becomes squandered. If we have the ability to create a reality through our consciousness, then filling your mind with pessimistic and angered thoughts feeds into making that a reality, surely. This is exactly what Vel and Mauro do, creating a feedback loop of disdain for human life and making a pretty miserable reality for themselves. Despite calling themselves scientists and talking about the need to research and learn, both characters lack a curiosity about the world right outside their doorstep, filled with a life form different from their own. It makes their moves feel unduly judgemental, and misguided, based on assumptions they haven’t the knowledge to hold. 

For Vel, it’s unlikely that anything worthwhile is to be found within the confines of the grim motel room where she sleeps every night, subsisting on saltine crackers and spending all free time with an ill-fated man who only reinforces your existing negative feelings about Earth. Vel makes no attempt to actually understand how or why people do things, and instead limits her experiences to the ones related to her by Mauro, who himself has been through many lifetimes on Earth. The Infinite Husk does not concern itself with who Vel was before being used as a husk, or anyone else who ends up in the same fate, just as it concerns itself very little with the spectrum of the human experience. 

While this may seem nitty gritty and overly analytical of the ideas presented, The Infinite Husk seeks to have a cerebral conversation about the value of life through a sci-fi story, which it ultimately cannot engage with in a meaningful way, instead opting for cynicism as a philosophical stance. This is not to say there’s nothing to complain about when it comes to existing within a human body, but maybe Vel should go work a full-time job for a few years and watch the news to earn some of that existential dread. 

The world Vel ultimately inhabits is very, very, small. She never goes outside of three spaces in search of forming bonds with any humans. This would matter less if the entire premise of the movie did not present Vel as a vessel for the potential meaning gleaned from daily human life and the relationships fostered with other people. As it is, her grandiose conclusions about the meaning of human existence deriving from the ways we connect with others are pretty meaningless given that she focused all her efforts on going home and instead of learning from those around her. This does little to inspire hope, and feels like it’s trying to take a shortcut to a meaningful ending, without doing the work to get there. 

What works exceedingly well in The Infinite Husk is the sound and visual work, which outdoes many recent sci-fi releases on its simplicity alone. You’re not set adrift into a fully CGI’d landscape, and any use of special effects feel engaging and potent. However, this does little to help demuddle the film’s central messages. If the same kind of restraint exhibited in the effects could have been applied to the film’s philosophy, a better film could have been unearthed. 

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