Rating: D
Dir: Simon Oliver
Star: Ira Chakraborty, Nathan Hill, Edward Mylan, Eleanor Powell
This low-budget SF feature from Australia has an interesting idea to start with. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear the makers had sufficient idea of how to develop it, and this, combined with resources which are well short of being adequate for the story, combine to leave the results less than satisfactory. It’s mostly the story of Sadie Van Hill-Song (Chakraborty), the wife of astronaut Ryan (Hill), who has recently gone into space. She gets told by NASA representative Colonel John Smith (Mylan) that contact was lost, but it was for barely a minute, and anyway, her husband then returns safely to Earth. The audience will likely be less surprised than Sadie, to discover that Ryan isn’t the man he used to be…
It’s a familiar scenario, dating back almost seventy years, to The Quatermass Xperiment, though my favourite in the sub-genre is likely the batshit lunacy of Species II. This just can’t compete, with no special effects beyond a CGI saucer at the end, and a latex mask for Ryan in his alien form which makes him look disturbingly like Kryten from Red Dwarf (top). It would be forgivable, if the film made up for this in imagination. For example, Under the Skin didn’t have a lot of effects, yet still did plenty with its “alien on Earth” story-line. This, however, doesn’t. There are a few threads which briefly seem promising, like Ryan’s visit to an “Alien Anonymous” group, only for these to go nowhere at all.
The same goes for his picking up a woman in a bar (again, shades of Under the Skin), and to be honest, the fact Sadie is pregnant doesn’t have anything like the impact it ought to have. The main problem there though, is probably Chakraborty, who is never the slightest bit convincing. Witness her performance when Sadie greets her husband on his return from a dangerous mission in space. The emotion shown would be more fitting if he had just popped down the shops for a pint of milk. Mind you, this is the entirety of her celebratory decorations, so maybe she simply didn’t care very much.
Hill is better, with a fractionally off-kilter depiction of humanity which does seem plausibly alien, as does his fondness for clothing with the NASA logo on it. Then there’s the ending, perhaps where the paucity of the production shines through most clearly. Because NASA brings the full force of its resources to bear on hunting down Ryan. All three people: those cutbacks clearly took their toll. They can’t even afford a car, instead jogging around in pursuit of the astronaut for a bit, before the saucer mentioned above arrives, and… Well, I guess Oliver was going for “ambiguous” in his ending. He actually achieved something closer to “ambiwhathefuck?” There are a couple of moments that are effective, such as a very nice shot from high up, shooting down through power-lines to where Ryan is heading for his close encounter. Just not nearly enough of them.