In the near future, clean-cut astronaut Lee Miller (Gunner Wright) embarks on a solo mission to the International Space Station, where he hopes to carry out a few routine maintenance tasks before returning to Earth. Inevitably, things go wrong. There’s the suggestion that a full-scale war has broken out on terra firma, as a shaky voice from mission control tells Miller, “I want to bring you out of orbit, but I don’t have the people to do it… We’re going to need you to sit tight for a while.” Meanwhile, other mysteries are quietly introduced. An opening sequence takes us not into space, but into the past, where a Union soldier is despatched to investigate an object in the desert during the American Civil War. This appears to have something to do with Miller, stuck 200 years in the future, but what? And what are we to make of the stark, interstitial interview scenes with apparently random members of the public, who each address the camera with their personal stories? Like a Dirk Gently mystery, these strands are fundamentally interconnected, as revealed in a conclusion that’s simultaneously ambiguous and satisfying. Eubank puts in a similarly impressive performance in his multiple roles as writer and filmmaker, and it’s to his credit that Love comes off so favourably when compared to the genre touchstones which have clearly inspired it; Solaris, Moon, and some of the other movies already mentioned are the most obvious.  With only limited resources at his disposal, Eubank successfully creates a convincing battle scene (with some sumptuous slow-motion), a claustrophobic Civil War bunker, and a chaotically detailed space station. That the latter was a relatively small set built on his driveway is never evident in the finished film – it’s an ominous, eerie place, and its design is cleverly used to further the narrative, with a gradually dwindling matrix of spinning fans subtly reflecting Miller’s mental deterioration. In the 1940s, Ray Bradbury wrote a short story called Kaleidoscope, published in the collection The Illustrated Man in 1951. It related the final experiences of a group astronauts floating through space, having been thrown from their ship in the wake of an unspecified disaster. Gradually, their lives wink out, leaving only the narrator, floating through space and wishing he could do “one good thing” before he died. Like Kaleidoscope, Love is about an individual’s experiences in the face of certain doom, and both stories find a way to end on an oblique ray of hope. Like Bradbury’s classic tale, Eubank has an ear for poetic dialogue – and one line in particular provides a connection between that short story and Love’s pervading atmosphere: “I feel like all the colours and shapes in the world have collided, and all I can do is sit there and watch.” Not everyone will be patient enough to engage with Love, and some might dismiss it as pretentious. But as a piece of low-budget filmmaking, its ambition is astonishing, and as a piece of cinema, it’s often mesmerising. Love is out in selected UK cinemas on the 7th September. Follow our Twitter feed for faster news and bad jokes right here. And be our Facebook chum here.