Directed by: Olatunde Osunsanmi
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas, Will Patton, and REAL PEOPLE BECAUSE THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENED (Not)
Plot: THIS REALLY HAPPENED! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! No it fucking didn’t, and no amount of whining at the beginning and end will make it real. Nor will more post-film “What happned next” notes than a TRUE FUCKING STORY will make this film truer than those. But basically this is Close Encounters of the Third Kind plus one channeled through Paranormal Activity and Northern Exposure.
Rule 1 for a film trying to make you believe it is a dramatisation of real events: Don’t have the lead fucking star stand there almost practically superimposed and introduce the fucking film. That’s so fucking TV it hurts. It’s a quicker disconnect than the Church of Scientology have ever acheived. It is possibly acting as a caveat for the fucking stupid.
It’s in that group of films of “Actual/Found” Footage, like Paranormal Activity, Blair Witch Project and Passion of the Christ, but it runs a dramatisation next to the “actual” footage to try and make you think that it’s based on something that actually happened. Framed on a level up from this is the central character (now actually looking like your “classic” grey and a husk of her former self and speaking like Julie Hagerty in Airplane!) in an interview with the director in a glib attempt to add gravitas to the story being true. Or something.
I’ll say it right now, you never see the fucking aliens. IF THEY EVEN EXISTED AT ALL. So you never get to find out if they look like David Morse, you never see if they’re tall or short, grey or green. And you certainly never get to see if they look anything like fucking owls. Yes, I said owls. Why? Because when the film is doing the WHY THE FUCK CAN’T I SLEEP AT NIGHT? psychoanalysis bit early on, it turns out that every single one of them remembers seeing an owl just before their sleeping/anal probe troubles.
Now, apparently there are 10 species of owl native to Alaska. This is 9 more species than there are of humans in Alaska. I’m assuming that seeing an owl at night when your house is surrounded by fucking trees in an area where owls are as common as whining children is not a rare occurence. I’m also assuming that owls are still nocturnal in Alaska….so using owls as a plot device for linking cases just seems like a idea born out of idiocy when they could have used something like a wolf, a kodiak bear or Al Pacino. An owl is just an invitation to make your case load bigger than it could be. “Oh I couldn’t sleep last night because there was an owl outside. It was hooting all fucking night.” “Are you sure it was sticking a cold steel rod up your backside?”
And on it goes, and boy does it drag towards the end. Over the course of the film you’ve seen a couple of Milla’s patients go bathshit mental during hypnosis – one that is so frightened by the experience that he goes home and murders his family before committing suicide, and the other that ends up levitating on his bed with his mouth wide opening speaking ancient Sumerian. Everything then focuses on Milla and her two children (her daughter has gone blind due to the trauma of her father’s death) – still coming to terms with the death of her husband that you saw stabbed at the start of the film (and whose killer has yet to be caught).
After she’s put under house arrest for “causing” three broken vertebrae in the levitating patient, things are starting to come to an end. Her daughter goes missing, supposedly kidnapped by the aliens and she is accused by the local sheriff of causing all this and takes her son into custody. Only one way to try and get her daughter back – go under hypnosis. This is probably the most effective scene of the film, and due to the 24 style double framing – the “actual” footage alongside the “dramatisation” before the fragmented Sumerian translation appears on screen. This is where it should have ended – the fallen camera and the air of WTF? mystery like at the end of Blair Witch.
Problem is, there’s just no mystery. You find out that her husband actually shot himself and that she’s been in denial all along. She’s not to blame for her daughter’s disappearence and she is now paraylzed from the neck down. Whilst intermittently effective, the film doesn’t have a clue what it wants to be – it would have been far better choosing early on which path to go down – “actual/found” footage OR dramatisation. It dances between the two like a drunken Grandparent at a wedding – carefree and with no fucking regard to what is going on around it. And hammering home the “THIS IS REAL” point really made me want to punch something hard. It’s an insult to the intelligence of everyone that watches it (though no doubt some people will actually believe it is real). What they should have done was lop off 25 minutes and gone down the “Actual” footage route, or just made it a straight up film about a mystery surrounding a remote town in Alaska.
That way I wouldn’t have been playing a 90 minute game of eye marble over a film that is suffering from Multiple Film Disorder.
Overall: 5/10 – generous, perhaps, but it was done with enough style at times and the “chills” were effective enough.
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