Winter Winds: Thoughts on the GRAVITY Companion Film, ANINGAAQ

Last week, something interesting arrived here on Earth.

Without much fanfare, Jonás Cuarón – the co-writer of GRAVITY, and son of its director Alfonso Cuarón – dropped the short film ANINGAAQ into our laps. If you’ve already seen GRAVITY, give the clip below a watch before I continue. If you haven’t seen GRAVITY, you might want to give this post a skip and come back once you have (translation: SPOILER WARNING).

What immediately comes to mind after watching this clip is the detail about GRAVITY it re-enforces.

After Ryan Stone discovers that there isn’t enough fuel in the ISS escape craft to get to safety, she starts to tinker with the station’s communications looking to reconnect with mission control. Perhaps more accurately, she’s looking to connect with anyone and not feel quite so abandoned. In that moment, breathing in less oxygen than she should be consuming, she hears a voice – a voice that doesn’t speak her language. In this voice she finds a small measure of comfort, and to this voice she gives her own benediction.

The detail that ANINGAAQ re-enforces is that her benediction was heard. Not long after this conversation, Stone is “visited” by Kowalski in the ISS. While at first it seems like he might actually be stepping into the craft, it ultimately becomes clear that he is a product of her oxygen-deprived imagination. Regardless, this vision gives her comfort as she wrestles whether or not her own life is worth fighting for.

As we watch Kowalski return, we begin to question the veracity of other things, including the conversation she had over the station’s communications. Is it possible that the whole thing never happened? That she so wanted to speak to any other living soul, that she just imagined one could hear her? Of course it is. Considering that there wasn’t enough oxygen getting to Stone’s brain, it’s easily possible that she could have been hearing voices. If she was, that would make that final declaration all that more sad and lonely.

However, what  Jonás Cuarón has done by adding this chapter back on Earth is added a little bit more melancholic beauty to the saga of Dr. Ryan Stone. At her most desperate, she put out a call, and her call was heard. It wasn’t heard by anyone who could help her, or even anyone who could understand her…but it was heard nonetheless. Wasn’t that what she wanted? To get one more morsel of contact with a single living soul before she felt her life slip away? What we see here underscores that she got what she wanted. She connected one last time.

The beauty in this is the way the characters sharing this conversation are in such polar opposite situations. Aningaaq has the bare necessities around him, living a life of great native simplicity. He has no ambitions of going to space, the thought probably hasn’t even crossed his mind. Stone meanwhile has so many modern comforts in her life, and has found herself in a situation that only the very special find themselves in. Yet as we listen to her speak to this man across that wire, and understand just how wracked her brain has become, we get the sense that she would trade places with him in a heartbeat.

As we watch this scene play out, we see all the contact she is deeply missing; the companionship of those dogs, the support of that spouse, and most importantly, the love for that child.

All at once, I am so happy that this film exists and that it wasn’t included in GRAVITY’s cut. While it underlines so many of the film’s themes, and adds a great deal of texture to this one iconic moment in the story, it would have felt too distracting in the moment. We needed to feel as isolated as Stone was…we needed to stay in space. Had the film cut down to this snowy plain in Greenland, we might have fallen out of step with Stone. We would have seen with our eyes how connected she still was, and lost that feeling of desperation.

Watching it separately though, one is deeply smitten with its beauty…and the way it underscores that true human contact isn’t tied to understanding the language.