Sam Peter Jackson | The Space You Need / 2025

gravitational pull

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Peter Jackson (screenwriter and director) The Space You Need / 2025 [21 minutes]

 

This silly and slightly wacky sci-fi romance is nonetheless truly charming, particularly since there is absolutely no way to take it seriously, allowing you to just sit back and have fun.

     Leo (Matthew Morrison), whose family business, Coulton Aluminum, formerly devoted to baked beans and potato peelers, has suddenly and quite inexplicably gone into the business of commercial space travel, offering up ordinary people the chance to make space flights, through Dexter Intergalactic Endeavours. Now for a low-cost price once only available to billionaires, as company spokesman, Janet Claremont (Christy Meyer) explains, well-off suburbanites can celebrate birthday parties in space, weddings, baby showers, even bachelorette parties in zero gravity.

     Yet Leo’s partner, Julian (Nick Hayes) is chaffing at having to now spend full time at such company events and their vacations with Leo’s parents at spa events. Julian suggest that he has now seen Leo’s father naked more than he has his own lover.

     Mostly, he regrets that they never do anything spontaneously anymore. They used to escape from every event, where now they are required to remain at events given Leo has become a CEO.

     Julian is a sci-fi writer, author of several fictions, but simply can’t create a new work. Something is missing in his life, and both men feel that despite the love they once felt, they are now living on different planets.

     Leo no longer wants to share Julian’s enthusiastic viewings of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey or even various Spielberg sci-fi fantasies. There is utterly no hope, these days, that the two might escape to a Berlin leather bar as Julian might fantasize.

     Indeed, Julian dreams that he is visited by a leatherboy (Branko Tomović) who follows the pieces of candy he lays out straight to his mouth, only to ask him if he’s taken out the bins and bought a cake for his dad’s 70th birthday.

     Even Julian’s best friend Bex (Oliver Cudbill), an effeminate replacement for the usual best girly friend' but, in this case, also a lawyer, is startled by his comrade “having a wet dream with a kind of earthbound extraterrestrial.” We also now learn that Julian’s new book just isn’t happening.

      As if this all weren’t enough, Leo comes home to announce that he is going into space on one of his company’s early launches.

      Julian is distressed, even terrified as Leo calmly packs up to take off in a rocket into space.

     Soon after Julian is telephoned by company liaison Janet Claremont to report that something has gone wrong on the flight, and the travelers, Leo included, have been transferred to a Japanese space station. They are all perfectly all right, but there is a delay before Leo can be retrieved.

      Trying to communicate with his lover during a bad connection further frustrates Julian as he and his friend Bex threaten to sue Leo’s company.  

   Not to worry, Claremont has called into service a young handsome, and gay, assistant, Milo Messenger (Giles Cooper), to help guide the dismayed companion through the unexpected incident.

     If the first session where he can hardly hear Leo speaking does not go well, a visit soon after to a local falafel stand invigorates Julian, and before you know it, Milo, a huge fan of Julian’s writing, and the author himself begin to find they have a great deal in common. His important

question of why, despite hinting of it, Julian has never created a truly gay sci-fi character triggers Julian’s imagination.

      As the week passes, with everyday contact with Julian and Leo, Julian and Milo find more and more in common with each other. This is a romance we have been waiting for, but it is suddenly interrupted as the Japanese report they will have a ship ready to return Leo to earth by the next Thursday.

     Basically, the time has come for Julian and Milo to say goodbye. But there is a further glitch the next day as Leo not only refuses to meet up on screen with Julian but refuses to return home. Janet assures Julian that such a decision is simply not possible, and his lover will be returning on the next Japanese pick-up. But clearly something has happened that Julian has simply not prepared for.

     Leo returns home to a now completely ill-at-ease, troubled Julian, hardly even knowing what to say to the man he loves. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending upon your point of view, Julian doesn’t even have the opportunity as Leo confesses that during his time in space he has fallen in love with a Japanese spaceman, Haruto (Kuni Tomita), the two having a sexual experience in space that can’t even be imagined by those on earth.

     Suddenly, the earthly Leo, realizes that perhaps his friend has been more spontaneous that he has, and rushes off to re-connect with the beautiful and totally compatible Otis.

     A year later, Leo and Haruto celebrate their marriage, an event attended by Julian and Otis, who have, true to form, escaped early. The newlywed open up the gift from Julian of his newest sci-fi book, obviously now with a gay hero.

    If this British film is about a breakup, not usually a very pleasant topic in gay cinematic literature, in this case it is a fortunate event in which both the original lovers have found a new space in which to explore their lives.

 

Los Angeles, June 29, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).