Cosmic horror is everywhere you look these days, but the quality-to-quantity ratio has always tended to be consistently inconsistent. While it’s not quite at the very bottom of the barrel, 2015’s long-forgotten 400 Days isn’t too far off, either.
Written and directed by Matt Osterman, the concept is nothing if not ambitious, and one that leaves the door wide open to existential anomalies and flesh-and-bone terrors alike. A group of astronauts are placed into a simulator designed to determine the long-term effects of interstellar travel, with the experiment due to last for the titular amount of days.
However, once they lose contact with the outside world, things grow increasingly sketchy. Initially believing it to be nothing more than part of the test, it takes the crew a while to come around to believing that something seriously unsettling is genuinely going on, with matters being compounded by the arrival of a sinister presence.
As mentioned, the high concept conceit is a potentially fascinating one, but given that 400 Days only has respective approval ratings of 22 and 19 percent from critics and audiences respectively on Rotten Tomatoes, it goes without saying that it didn’t come anywhere near to maximizing its own potential.
Intergalactic tales of terror are regularly big drawing cards on streaming, though, so the fact FlixPatrol has named 400 Days as one of the Top 10 most-watched features among Chili subscribers in the United Kingdom once again underlines that spooky tales revolving around the deepest and darkest recesses of space are always going to bring ’em in.
