Spaceman ending explained: Do Jakub & Lenka get back together?

Spaceman, Adam Sandler’s new sci-fi tearjerker on Netflix, explores a rift in space, time, and love – here’s what director Johan Renck has to say about its ending.

The film begins 198 days into Jakub’s (Sandler) solo deep-space expedition to collect a sample from Chopra, a magnificent interstellar cloud on the outskirts of Jupiter. He touches base with the Czech space center, takes place in Euro Space Program broadcasts, parrots sponsorship slogans, and almost anything… except, of late, speaking to his wife, Lenka (Carey Mulligan).

She delivers a message that could result in the end of the message: as he drifts hundreds of millions of miles away, she’s leaving him. His superiors keep the bad news from him, leaving him alone and suspicious – and that’s when he meets Hanuš (Paul Dano), an alien spider that wants to help him find inner peace.

The movie builds to a part-devastating, part-ambiguous ending as Jakub and Hanuš’ relationship reaches its inevitable end – but what does it mean for him and Lenka?

Spaceman ending explained

Spaceman ends with Jakub and Hanuš entering Chopra and discovering what lies within: “Every vibration of all time.” They’re sucked through a wormhole and exit the other side, where Hanuš is killed by the Gorompeds. Jakub is rescued by the Korean astronauts, and he finally speaks to Jenka.

Early in the movie, Lenka seems like a bit of a villain: a fed-up wife sick of her husband’s ambition and stoic nature who breaks up him at a time when he can’t argue back. Of course, there’s far more to it than that: Jakub may have wanted to see the stars, but it was ultimately an escape from all of his trauma, whether it’s his childhood experiences of nearly drowning and his father’s work with the Communist Party, or Lenka’s miscarriage, which he handled abysmally.

He’s never been a source of comfort to anyone; he offers empty words, but his mind is always elsewhere. “With great conviction, you do not even try to understand your mate… it is impossible to connect with someone who does not want to see anything but himself,” Hanuš tells him, before slipping away into the ship and vanishing.

Jakub convinces Peter (Kunal Nayyar) to reach out to Lenka and have her listen to him speak over the phone. “Do you remember when I said I wanted to see beyond Jupiter? I can’t imagine anything worse now, I just want to come home…. now I can’t for the life of me understand why I kept leaving you behind,” he tells her.

“You tried hard to know me, I’m so sorry I never made a real effort to know you… I have lived a life for all the wrong reasons. What a f**king waste. I don’t deserve you, and I never have.”

After this call, Hanuš returns. “You’ve purged, skinny human,” he says.

Jakub and Hanuš enter Chopra

Netflix

It’s soon time for the mission on “the doorstep to the universe.” Jakub deploys the FERDA machine to collect a sample from the Chopra cloud (despite the impossibility of storing cosmic grains), but things start to go wrong. The spacecraft takes critical damage and Jakub loses communication with ground control – and that’s before he looks over to Hanuš, whose condition is rapidly deteriorating as Gorompeds eat away at his flesh under his skin.

He flees the ship, but Jakub chases after him, floating out into space with a can of decontaminant. As he fires it, he’s flung back and enters a never-ending spin into the distance. Hanuš stops him and praises his “heroic” effort, but warns it won’t stop his death.

Before that time comes, Hanuš takes Jakub (who “absolves” his dad of his sins) into the cloud as his ship sinks into the cosmos. Inside, he sees his own big bang; an unimaginable collision of his past, present, and future. “This is it, this is everything. This is the beginning and the ending… it is all contained here,” Hanuš explains.

“Me, you, your Lenka, your father. Every promise, every heartbreak, every atonement. Everything is permanent, yet nothing really is. That is the truth of the universe.”

They’re sucked through a stretchy wormhole and spat out the other side, where a bright light shines in the distance. He shows Hanuš the first time met Lenka. “It’s a miracle you met at all,” Hanuš says.

But it’s too late for Jakub’s eight-legged friend. “I feel you slipping away,” he says. Hanuš dies clutching a tub of chocolate spread as parasites eat him alive and reduce him to Chopra’s luminescent dust.

Back on Earth, Lenka looks at the same cloud and sees one of its purple grains floating nearby. They close their eyes at the same time and say each other’s name; even 500 million kilometers away, they’re connected.

Jakub is picked up by the South Koreans, who really were just behind him all along. Once he’s aboard, he uses their phone to call Lenka. “If I had known then what I know now, I never would have left,” he says. “If I had known then what I know now, would I have kissed you?” she asks herself.

“Would you? Would you kiss me again?” he responds. She smiles, and says: “It was a really good kiss.”

Do Jakub and Lenka get back together?

Netflix

In the eyes of director Johan Renck, Jakub and Lenka do get back together – but they won’t necessarily have a happy ending.

In an interview with Dexerto, Renck revealed he considered a “couple of endings”, and that an earlier version was “way more impressionist.”

“There was very much less a sense of the fact that they would get back together. My answer, my view on it – which lies in the eye of the beholder, and it’s your prerogative to have any answer you want – is what I wanted to provide people with was the idea of them getting together in the end,” he explained.

“But are they going to live happily ever after? That we can’t say anything about, you know. It’s about the fact that he gets a second chance, I wanted that.

“Early in the making of the film, that was way less clear. But I felt… I don’t want this to be nihilistic, and I also have to have to have an ending of the film that is reasonably satisfying. You don’t sit through a film for an hour-and-a-half or two and end up [thinking], ‘So what the fuck actually happened here?’

“I don’t want to do that. I believe in impressionism, but I don’t believe in it in a way in which me, as a filmmaker, doesn’t provide the viewer with enough for you to make that decision, rather than going, ‘I don’t fucking know what happens here.'”

Spaceman is available to stream on Netflix now. You can read our review here.