D: Sebastián Cordero. S: Philip Gelatt. P: Ben Browning. Cast: Christian Camargo, Anamaria Marinca, Michael Nyqvist, Daniel Wu, Karolina Wydra. UK dist: Netflix.

The found-footage device may have seen its horror debut with Ruggero Deodato’s Cannibal Holocaust (1979), but watching Sebastián Cordero’s Europa Report reminds us that the technique had its origins much earlier in SF – namely, in a short segment of Val Guest’s The Quatermass Xperiment (1955). In that film, a loose adaptation of Nigel Kneale’s BBC thriller, boffins examine a “black box” flight recording to find out why the crewmen of a crashed rocket have vanished en route to Earth. The footage is presented silent, on grainy black-and-white film; oddly enough, the exact reverse of how Kneale had originally written it (as a sound recording, frustratingly devoid of visual information). Guest’s revision is eerily convincing, the fixed camera recording the tragedy with the clinical detachment of a newsreel. Europa Report extends this idea to feature-length, presenting its footage in the form of a video report captured by multiple cameras aboard the first manned mission to Europa, a moon of Jupiter. The crew are hopeful they’ll find life on Europa. Unless, of course, it finds them first…

The report unspools in non-linear fashion, the original flight recordings interspersed with direct-to-camera recollections from the mission controllers on Earth. (The fragmented nature of the shipboard material – with cheery broadcasts to the folks back home interrupted brusquely by flash-forwards to later tragedies – cleverly underscores the earlier stages of the film, when optimism is still running high amongst the crew, with a sense of dark foreboding. It’s dramatically justified, within the “report” conceit, since the data is being presented as-found from a damaged video uplink.)

Trouble hits the Europa 1 mission early on, when the ship is caught in a solar storm; not only are their communications knocked out, but one of the astronauts is lost during an EVA when his suit is lethally contaminated. Knowing he can’t re-enter the ship without poisoning his crewmates, he elects to drift away from the ship, to die in the depths of space. This is a quietly chilling sequence, shot from multiple POVs: cameras on the outside of the craft, and inside the astronaut’s helmet. We watch, from his helpless viewpoint, as the tiny spacecraft shrinks into the blackness of outer space, and the voices on the radio crackle and die. For a moment, we know what it is to be totally alone.

The tension kicks up several notches once the mission reaches Europa and the crew try to land on the icy surface. Thermal vents knock the ship off-course, and it’s forced to touch down some distance from the target zone. The images of the moon’s surface, captured by cameras on the lander’s exterior, are eerily beautiful: great glaciers rear up over the ship, throwing vast shadows across the ice. We share the crew’s awe, as they realise they’re gazing out at an alien world, impossibly distant from their own. But one of the crew (Michael Nyqvist) sees something more: a strange blue light, out on the ice, which he fails to capture on camera…

Following mission protocols, the crew drills down through the ice and deploys a probe into the ocean below. But the remote device lasts only a few minutes before being taken out by a strange glowing light, which surges abruptly from the sea around it. The ship’s biologist (Karolina Wydra) then takes a fateful decision: she will leave the ship to take samples from the ice herself, from the original target zone. The high levels of radiation on the moon’s surface mean she can only stay outside for a few short minutes – time enough, however, to secure the microcellular proof of life on Europa. But her triumph is short-lived: under the ice an unearthly blue glow is approaching, and as the background radiation spikes alarmingly, all contact is lost…

There’s an appealing no-nonsense feel to Europa Report, which helps us forgive its minor failings. It’s a low-budget production, of course, though advances in CGI technology mean that the effects-work, by and large, is pretty flawless; the illusion of weightlessness inside the Europa 1 capsule is never less than convincing, and the various spacewalks and planetary excursions are likewise well-handled. The cast is mostly fine, if undistinguished: Michael Nyqvist (of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) is the only “name” player, the remainder of the roles being filled by unknowns (of whom Karolina Wydra, as the hottie biologist, makes the most impact). Some of their interactions earlier in the film struck me as slightly contrived, but as the drama of the mission – and the reality of their predicament – takes hold, such concerns fall away. Once we reach Europa the suspense is rock-solid, and if the conclusion is rather less than ingenious, the build-up at least is impeccable.

The hard-SF approach puts Europa Report in roughly the same camp as Duncan Jones’s Moon (2009), though it wears its genre influences less obviously; where Moon often felt like a patchwork of quotations from its director’s favourite movies, Europa seems less self-indulgent, more tightly-focused on telling a good story with maximum credibility. Of course, its “life-on-Europa” plot unavoidably raises the spectre of Arthur C. Clarke, whose novel “2010” (filmed in 1984 by Peter Hyams) touched broadly similar ground, though there the similarities end. SF fans with longer memories will be pleased by Europa’s nod to the Soviet-era films of the 60s, in which multi-national crews embarked on dogmatically-pure treks to the stars; Europa displays a similar utopian vision of the future, with the Amerocentric bias of NASA replaced with a politically-neutral pan-global project dedicated only to the pursuit of knowledge. Europa carries the optimism a bit too far in an unconvincingly upbeat coda, wherein a dewy-eyed mission controller waxes metaphysical on the fact that Man Is No Longer Alone In The Universe. The related facts – that the life we’ve discovered is unambiguously hostile, and that the entire crew of the Europa mission is dead – seem not to cause her undue concern. Perhaps that’s not too far from reality, though; while astronauts may no longer be viewed as “spam in a can”, they will always be regarded as essentially expendable. After all, why let the loss of a few lives spoil a really cool discovery?