PROSPECT is a nugget worth digging up from a vein of obscurity, in this case located in the recesses of 2018, a year where a a batch of worthy movies (The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs, The Guernsey Literary And Potato Peel Society, Lucky, Outlaw King, Black ’47) barely got any release. This trim, smart indie, made with $4,000,000 and a lot of imagination only took in $22,700 at film festivals, a trickle putting it at spot #307 for the year.

Space, the Future. Hoping to strike it rich from harvesting gem deposits, prospector ‘Damon’ (Jay Duplass) and his teenage daughter ‘Cee’ (Sophie Thatcher, 17) land their pod craft on the forest-covered moon of ‘the Green Planet’, an environmentally toxic habitat where valuable gems grow, oyster like, inside living organisms in the ground. Their plan is to join up with ‘mercs’—rogue miners who stayed behind after ‘gem rush’ petered out, looking for the big strike everyone else missed. Their craft is damaged, then they encounter rivals, ‘Ezra’ (Pedro Pascal) and his ominously silent partner ‘Number Two’. Share and share alike? Not on this or any moon.

Written & directed by Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell as their first feature, with interiors done in Seattle and exteriors shot in Washington’s Hoh rainforest near Olympic National Park. Instead of focusing on monstrous alien species, spectacular spaceship battles or mock-Shakepearean intergalactic politics, the down-to-mining-moon script zeroes in on the basic instinct/survival of the wittest codes of the New West that working-class grunts deal in and with. As writers, Earl & Caldwell crafted a smooth-flowing mixture of clever yet sensible terminology and—for Pascal—self-amused oratorical flourishes. They designed believable costuming and weapons, and the direction maintains tension throughout, without resorting to cheap scares or tropes. Thatcher, in her feature debut, shows the promise she would go to deliver in Heretic and Companion. Simply put, Pascal graces every project he’s part of. The atmosphere provided by the lush exotica of the rainforest topography and canopy was augmented by simple and effective non-CGI special effects—dust, tossed in the air, filmed, that then overlaid into the location footage. Zeek also manned the camera.

With Andre Royo (from The Wire), Sheila Vand (of A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night) and Luke Pitzrick. 100 minutes.

From the ground up: directors/writers Chris Caldwell (l) and Zeek Earl (r) set up a shot in the down-home-otherworldly Hoh rainforest