Vesper

 Vesper is an English-language French movie written and directed by Kristina Buožytė and Bruno Samper, shot in Lithuania. It's a bleak, brutal coming of age story set in a near-future biopunk hellscape.

Biopunk is a sci-fi subgenre that focuses on biotechnology - it's well-represented in literature (my favorite exponent is probably Pablo Bacigalupi's The Wind Up Girl) but not really that common in cinema; Besides the films of both Cronembergs, I guess you could argue the Blade Runners are a bit biopunk.

 Vesper embraces the genre with gusto. A crashed ornithopter-like vehicle sheds a trail of organic parts as it goes down, generators run on cultures of bacteria, drone repair looks like a deleted scene from Videodrome, and so on. It's a bit too fantastic to register as proper hard scifi, unfortunately (too many things seem either too far-fetched or too nonsensical) but the world is lovingly rendered with a lot of imagination, detail and texture.

 It's set at some point in a future where biotechnology run amok has wrecked the ecosystem. Animals as we know them are gone, trees sport meaty, cancerous growths, there's weeds that shoot weird insectile missiles (remember what I said about the 'science' being a bit too silly?) and so on; the film does a great job at portraying a world that's been completely remade. Enclosed Citadels house the high castes of the world, who live in relative luxury while people outside survive how they can - and one of the ways they maintain their power is by selling seeds that have been genetically locked so that they only last a generation (utopia, as designed by Monsanto/Cargill.)

 13-year-old Vesper (Raffiella Chapman) wasn't born on a Citadel. She lives alone in a small house with her invalid father (the great character actor Richard Brake) who is bed-bound but often accompanies her via a remote-control floating drone; her life consists of foraging in the mud for edibles and weird plants to run her biotech experiments on, and occasionally trading with neighboring creep Jonas (Eddie Marsan), who runs a cultish compound close to her house.
 After a leisurely first act introducing Vesper and her world, the movie coalesces around two events and their consequences: First, Vesper is forced to steal some valuable supplies from Jonas. Then she sees a crashing flying vehicle and rescues one of its passengers (Rosy McEwen.)
 The Passenger, Camelia, is a Citadel resident, and she promises Vesper access to it if she helps her out with a few tasks. The rest of the story has to do with their tentative friendship, and the escalating sets of complications Vesper's actions and Camelia's just being there brings for everyone involved.

 The movie feels a bit like a young adult yarn at times, and that's not helped at all by using the tired old 'girl genius' trope (Vesper, you see, happens to be an absolute wiz at biotech hacking!) It's a french young adult yarn, though, so it leans extra cruel with a discomfiting side of sexual menace.
 It gets pretty dark; not overwhelmingly so, but this is the sort of movie that unceremoniously kills of important characters and is happy to deny the more traditional payoffs you'd expect out of this sort of thing.

 The pacing is sedate at first, but soon it ratchets up the tension as you wait for the other shoe(s) to drop. It also does surprise with some tense action, not incredibly ambitious but well staged.

 All the actors are good. Chapman is fierce and committed, and Marsan gives a great, sleazy performance that makes for a very hiss-worthy villain, especially once things get serious and he lets his freak flag fly. It's a low-budget movie but it's got an interesting aesthetic going on with a lot of light/shadow contrast (people who hate washed-out looks and dark cinematography may want to sit this one out). The effects are pretty good and imaginative, and I especially liked the wardrobe design; there are some really good-looking, original costumes on display:

Full-face facemask

Full-body hood (over an actual hood!)

 It's a good one.