Beneath the Green (2023)

Caleb (Anthony Nikolchev), a wayward astronaut searching the star system for precious metals, wakes up lost on the forested planet of Anthemusa, a world that used to be a desert. Confused and suffering from amnesia, he meets five missing astronauts who may or may not be dead. The de-facto leader of the group is Hunter (Veronica Wylie), the spiritual heart of the team who reveals that they were sent to colonize Anthemusa based on evidence suggesting the planet was green and habitable only to find all too late that this data was false – the world was completely devoid of all life. Ill-equipped to deal with the unexpected environment and in a mysterious turn of events, the team wakes up in a version of Anthemusa much like the habitable world they expected to find. To make matters more puzzling, their mission commander, Victor (Eric Roberts), has gone missing. Caleb suspects that his disappearance has something to do with finding a way back home after Hunter reveals a form of meditation that reveals “a door.” Dante (Jay Eftimoski), a colonist with hopes of escaping the planet, claims to have seen this “door” during a meditation and believes Victor has found it. Hunter suggests that there is no “door” and that they must accept their present, doomed fate as lost colonizers. Struggling to come to terms with this reality, Caleb resists and uses meditation to contact Victor, who appears to him as a floating head that speaks in cryptic riddles about “the door.” Feeling closer to escaping with the others in tow, Caleb and Hunter search the vast forest to find Victor and a way back home…