Moonfish, the debut animated feature from Brooklyn-based artist Daniel Zvereff, premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 6 as part of the Biennale College Cinema program, making it the only animated film selected for this year’s festival. Voiced by Morgan Spector and Lucy Liu, who also executive produced, the film has drawn an intrigued critical response, with reviewers largely agreeing on its striking, minimalist craftsmanship while differing on how fully its emotional and existential ambitions land.
Set roughly 500 years in the future, the story follows Cassius, played by Spector, and Vesper, played by Liu, a pair of astronauts sent to mine an asteroid, with a strict corporate quota standing between them and their return home. As their year of gruelling, indentured labour stretches on, isolation and grief begin to fracture Cassius’ grip on reality, blurring the line between what is real and what is not. Presented almost entirely in grayscale and shot in a boxy, claustrophobic 4:3 aspect ratio, the film renders its human characters as bald, sparsely drawn figures, creating a deliberately spare visual language that defines the entire viewing experience.
The Hollywood Reporter’s review described Moonfish as “a study in sadness, loneliness and the quixotic struggle to survive extremes,” praising how Spector and Liu “bring warmth to material that might otherwise have felt overwhelmingly depressing.” The review also highlighted what it called “a welcome upbeat ending” that “glows up the story with a bit of color.”
However, the review was candid about the film’s commercial ceiling, noting that its “handmade, extremely spare and minimalist aesthetic” will likely limit it to arthouses, festivals and adventurous streamers, while still arguing that the talent on display is enough to generate interest in Zvereff’s future work.
The Playlist’s Brian Farvour offered a similarly admiring but more ambivalent take, calling the film “haunting but elusive” and describing it as a study of sadness, loneliness and the struggle to survive extreme circumstances. Farvour’s review leaned into the film’s unresolved, dreamlike quality, treating its ambiguity as central to its identity rather than a flaw that needs to be resolved.
IndieWire’s review took a direct comparative approach, positioning Moonfish against another 2026 space-set release, Project Hail Mary. While that film is described as being rooted in hope and focused on what one person can accomplish, Zvereff’s film takes the opposite approach, spending its time inside the psyche of a lonely protagonist facing the existential crisis triggered by abandonment in outer space.
The review, headlined “A Bizarro Project Hail Mary,” was also blunt about the film’s visual austerity. It noted that the first thing viewers will notice is how suffocatingly gray Moonfish looks, with the moon, spaceship and astronaut all rendered in the same flat monochrome palette.
The voice performances have received consistently positive responses despite the challenges of the material. Spector, making his first animated film, has spoken about the difficulty of embodying a character who is slowly unraveling. He told Variety that his character belongs to an “underclass” of people “without rights, assets or any real hope for the future” within Zvereff’s imagined future.
Liu, a veteran of animated voice work from Kung Fu Panda to Strange World, told Variety that she was drawn to the project specifically to support a first-time filmmaker working outside the constraints of major studio “red tape.” She also voices a talking fish companion, which Zvereff has said was inspired by miners historically bringing canaries into mines as an early warning system.
Much of the film’s emotional weight traces back to its personal origins. Zvereff, who wrote, directed and edited the film himself, has said the project was conceived after a false medical diagnosis left him believing for two agonising weeks that he was dying. IndieWire’s review connects that experience directly to the film’s preoccupation with “what it means to grieve our own humanity in real time” and the melancholy of watching one’s life slip away without much to show for it.
Taken together, the reviews describe a film whose visual and conceptual ambition is not in question, even as critics differ on how completely its bleak, slow-burn atmosphere pays off emotionally. Whether read as a haunting meditation on corporate exploitation and grief or a beautifully rendered but occasionally impenetrable arthouse experiment, Moonfish has emerged from Venice as one of the festival’s more distinctive and closely discussed discoveries, anchored by a filmmaker whose next project critics are already eager to see.
Watch Trailer:
Film Details : Moonfish
Director/Writer/Editor: Daniel Zvereff
Cast: Morgan Spector, Lucy Liu
Genre: Animated Science Fiction Drama
Runtime: 89 minutes
Country: United States
Language: English
Production Companies: Present Company, Lucky Accident Productions, Cartuna
International Sales: New Europe Film Sales
Festival: Venice Film Festival 2026 (Biennale College Cinema)
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