Primetime Emmy winners Sterling K. Brown and Mark Duplass are stuck together in the teaser for the end-of-the-world dramedy Biosphere. In Mel Eslyn's surprise Toronto International Film Festival debut, the two stars play long-time best friends who are left as the last men on Earth and forced to survive inside the titular containment facility and evolve to keep humanity going strong. As the footage shows, though, it's not an easy task as problems arise threatening their survival all while their sanity deteriorates.
The two friends' survival is largely thanks to Ray (Brown) who put his brilliant scientific mind to work creating the perfect biosphere to keep himself and his pal Billy (Duplass) alive and entertained for the foreseeable future. In terms of work ethic, they're definitely different people. While Billy will help with the occasional chore, it's mostly Ray carrying them forward by doing important research or washing dishes while Billy plays video games and lazes around. There's a bit of tension between the two, but they deeply care about one another as they spend their free time working out, playing chess, or tossing around a basketball. As their fishpond starts running thin, however, even Billy is spurred into researching what's wrong, prompting Ray to muse "This really is the end of the world." Things are kept ambiguous, as the team behind the project intended, but the rest of the teaser sees the two bordering on a breakdown at times while they try to keep their spirits up. As if teasing the underlying mystery of it all, Ray ends with a mysterious, almost giddy tease to Billy - "There's something else."
Biosphere marks the feature directorial debut of the veteran producer Eslyn who previously served on Hulu's dark comedy The Drop as well as the hit documentary Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off. She also wrote and directed multiple individual episodes of the HBO anthology series Room 104 which Duplass and his brother Jay Duplass co-created. The brothers serve as executive producers on Biosphere.
Eslyn's Debut Confounded and Amused Critics at TIFF
Her first time helming a feature won over viewers at TIFF, currently sitting at a 90% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. Eslyn's writing got plenty of love for its grim nature as the two men contemplate their deaths and the death of the Earth as we know it. It also helps that Eslyn secured a dynamic duo in Brown and Duplass who collectively have four Emmys for their work. Brown earned his flowers for This Is Us, American Crime Story, and as the narrator of Lincoln: Divided We Stand, though he's also gotten plenty of love as a voice actor on animated projects like Solar Opposites and, more recently, the adorably imaginative Interrupting Chicken. Duplass, meanwhile, scored an Emmy for the cult documentary Wild Wild Country and earned plenty of love for his role on The Morning Show among other projects.
Biosphere will release in theaters in July. Check out the teaser below.