This film contains a lot of thematic tropes from movies across the ages, lifted straight from a hundred other conspiracy/big business/the-powers-that-be-are-lying-to-you thrillers to the extent you'll figure out what's going on a lot sooner than the characters do.

It's the 23rd century and a young woman trained as a doctor, Laura (Anna Katharina Schwabroh) is sitting on a dingy, crowded space station orbiting Earth, the planet below uninhabitable thanks to ecological collapse and with the remainder of humanity living like she is – cramped, cold and starving.

But Laura has a plan. She's joining a cargo transport bound for an off-world construction project, a trip that will fund her journey to a distant planet Rhea, where he sister, niece and nephew live in an Earth-like idyll.

Meeting her salty crew, all of them with an excess of personality, Laura settles in to prepare for the routine that will occupy them for the next few years – long periods of cryosleep while one of them stays awake to monitor systems for a few months at a stretch.

The crew are suspicious and tetchy, especially with the company-enforced presence of security officer Decker (Martin Rapold), who's there to defend against the threat of terrorist activity by a Luddite group and whom nobody trusts.

Months later, towards the end of her period of wakefulness, Laura gets spooked by the feeling someone else is around and watching her, and she finds Decker awake too, claiming he's been doing safety checks. After they both hear strange noises from the cavernous cargo area and wake up the captain to report them, he instructs the trio to investigate.

But while walking carefully along spindly walkways next to precipitous drops, Laura is horrified to see the captian plummet past her, having fallen or been pushed to his death. Laura and Decker wake the rest of the gang to investigate, and the search is on.

While they're investigating the cargo for clues and find the body of a young girl kept in some sort of suspended animation – not construction materials as they've been told – it's the first layer of the onion they start to peel back to get to the truth, tensions amid the group rising as more bodies turn up.

Things only grow curioser when Laura receives a response to her radioed messages to her sister on Rhea in a few minutes rather than years, making her wonder where they really are and where they're going.

I won't blow the big reveal except to say that Decker is not what he seems, and neither is the company they work for or the cargo they're carrying, and it borrows a hefty slice of theme from The Matrix (I've already said too much).

The story might not be the most original – and the way the script ties the strange happenings to the grand reveal isn't altogether clear, but the visual effects are excellent, especially for the year it came out and the (presumably) far lower budget a German production offered compared to a Hollywood film.

It also borrows an effectively bleak tone from Aniara, another recent European space opera with similarly great visuals, and it's production design of dank, steamy corridors and clanking industrial locales evokes the Alien franchise.

So while almost everything from the story to the tone has been borrowed from better known (and in some cases better) movies, it's all put together very effectively.