106 min | NR | July 7, 2023 | IFC Films
Two men, the last on Earth, share a dome one of them built. The other is the ex-president who ignored every warning. The setup is wild and the talk crackles, but the film runs out of road before it runs out of ideas.
Billy and Ray are the last two men alive on Earth. They share a sealed dome that Ray built before the world ended. Billy is a former president. Ray is the scientist who tried to warn him. Their fish supply starts to die, and with it their last source of food. The film uses an extinction-level premise to ask a smaller and stranger question. What does masculinity become when there is no one left to perform it for?
Mark Duplass plays Billy as a man who coasts on charm and never learned to think hard. He fills silence with jokes because silence frightens him. Sterling K. Brown plays Ray with patience that curdles into condescension. Ray knows more than Billy and cannot stop reminding him. The two actors have logged enough time together to make the friendship feel decades old. Their banter carries the weight the plot keeps threatening to drop.
Mel Eslyn directs her first feature from a script she wrote with Duplass. She stages the entire story inside one structure and lights it with the cold artificial glow of grow lamps and emergency bulbs. The production design sells the dome as a place built fast and lived in long. Eslyn shoots the conversations in long takes that let the actors find the rhythm of old friends. The approach works when the dialogue crackles and stalls when the script circles the same idea. The contained setting magnifies every dead patch in the writing.
Biosphere has more ideas than it knows how to spend. The premise opens a door to questions about gender, survival, and change, and the film walks through it with real curiosity. The problem is pacing. The script discovers its big turn early and then talks around it for a long stretch before committing. The result is a two-hander that rewards its actors and tests its audience. The ideas are alive. The shape that holds them is loose.