Boys Go To Jupiter Review: Surreal wisdom

A young gig worker comes of age in the wonderfully surreal Boys Go To Jupiter as he runs into odd customers and odder extraterrestrials.

Grubster is a sort of Just Eat app, and each drop-off ends with Billy warmly intoning ‘have a grubby day’. While he’s thinking of the future, his friends are hanging at the beach and stealing from the gas station. So far, so teenage.

On the periphery, a worm-shaped blob materialises in the neighbourhood, and a smaller, rounder one befriends Billy. These random – and adorable! – beings are no more strange than some of the interactions he has with his customers, like a local, anonymous spaghetti connoisseur who requests Billy feed the delivery through the letterbox. 

Although the film takes place between Christmas and New Year, its vaporwave colour palette invokes a nostalgic end-of-summer vibe. Warm concrete and hazy sunsets are coated in pink pastels, dominating the landscape. The film’s world is sparsely inhabited, similar to an early-gen video game in which characters only exist if they serve a purpose. It’s a quiet film, like the echo of an adolescent memory.

Puncturing Boys Go To Jupiter’s soft aesthetic is Billy’s exhausting capitalist pursuit. He takes inspiration from a vlogger called Mr Moolah (Demi Adejuyigbe), a bodiless cloud evoking digital self-help gurus who deal in vapid life-hacks and meaningless platitudes. Billy is in a rush to grow up, skipping showers to fulfil more orders because he ‘lives for the hustle’ and gaming currency conversion to make money faster. 

But he’s more often on the receiving end of capitalism’s dehumanisation, such as when a customer asks Billy to chew food for them before completing the delivery, which he obliges. When he asks what would happen if he wasn’t so smart, he’s told he would have to bring something else to the table because he wouldn’t be allowed to be so off-putting. Billy’s interactions are loaded with these transactions; he wants to give solely in order to receive. It’s only when offered $5,000 in exchange for something he holds dear that he starts to wonder the cost to his integrity, a facet of his life he was never taught to consider, not when there’s money to be made. 

But Boys To Go Jupiter isn’t all hard truths. There are playful oddities punctuating the profundity. Short musical ditties act as exposition, some played entirely straight, some extremely psychedelic. Farfetched local legends inevitably turn out to be entirely accurate. The film shares a spirit with Don Hertzfeldt, who is the master of combining surrealist animation with existential pondering. One moment an anthropomorphic dinosaur statue is lamenting the damage done to a crazy golf course, the next young Billy has to consider being told he’d make a great dad. The film has a way of using strangeness to make reality sharper; Billy might find himself in unrealistic and otherworldly situations, but they exist to emphasise his agency and the choices he is free to make. One gaseous supernatural being tells him making no choice is still a choice. 

Boys Go To Jupiter is a delightful dream of a film, one in which lines like ‘no one ever got to heaven on an electric vehicle’ are delivered with dry wit and deep wisdom. At the heart of it is a battle for Billy’s soul as he comes of age. He can choose a careerist path or a compassionate one, and the film makes a sound argument that it’s one or the other. Mr Moolah says of Grubster: ‘You order the food, someone else does the rest, and you don’t even have to say thank you’. This is Billy’s journey as he decides whether to become someone who says thank you or not. 

Boys Go To Jupiter will be screened at the Glasgow Film Festival on March 4-5, 2025. Read our Glasgow Film Festival reviews!