Rand Ravich’s The Astronaut’s Wife is a film with a vast gap between its strongest and weakest aspects. It’s a visually striking, occasionally intelligent thriller, brimming with mystery – that is, until the denouement. Johnny Depp plays the astronaut who returns to Earth after a mysterious near-miss in space. Charlize Theron is the wife who must uncover the consequences of it all. Depp is charismatically enigmatic at first, but ultimately struggles to make sense of his woefully underwritten character. Theron does the devoted wife well, but is left defenseless against a script that squanders both its own potential and the efforts by the cast. Much of the blame lies with the relatively inexperienced director, Rand Ravich, who, despite his smooth storytelling and eye for composition, fails to make his film transcend the story’s banal and unremarkable mystery.