The Fourth Kind (2009)

Directed and written by Olatunde Osunsanmi
Featuring Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas, Corey Johnson

Alien abductions seem to have slipped off the cultural agenda in recent years. Gone are the glory days of the 1990s, when The X-Files inspired everyone and their grandmother to believe that they were beamed into the belly of a spaceship on a nightly basis in order to be violated in the name of alien research (the "fourth kind" of alien encounter). A 2000 poll suggested an eye-popping 52% of Americans actually wanted contact with an ET, although interest - and belief - in alien life forms has since waned. However, as we turn the final corner towards 2012, it seems we can expect the little grey rocketmen to make a re-appearance, at least at our multiplexes, if not actually brandishing their anal probes at the end of our beds. Once again, it seems horror audiences may want to scream at something other than a sociopath in a mask. There's no bad man like a spaceman, right?

Leading the charge of extra-terrestrial villains is The Fourth Kind, conceived by writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi as a kind of big budget docu-horror, mixing grainy "archive footage" with glossy re-enactments of events that supposedly took place in October 2000. At the top, Milla Jovovich bounces through the fourth wall and informs us onscreen that she will be playing Dr. Judith Tyler, an Alaskan psychologist, on whose videotaped interviews the narrative is based. What follows is a bizarre and occasionally un-nerving mash-up of washed-out, degraded VT recordings played against the stylized Hollywood re-interpretation of people and phenomena.

Blind-sided by her husband's unexplained and sudden death, Tyler returns to work as a psychologist in the isolated Alaskan town of Nome, flying in on a plane as there are no roads connecting this place with the wider world. She quickly becomes aware that different patients keep telling her the same thing; they suffer from interrupted sleep, and fear that owls watch outside - or possibly inside - their windows at night. After she hypnotizes a couple of them it becomes apparent that their nocturnal visitors are alien rather than avian in origin, and that they do "bad things" to her patients, perpetrating horrors that cannot be described or dealt with by regular consciousness. Uncovering the suppressed memories, even via hypnosis, has terrible consequences. One patient goes home from Tyler's office and shoots his family, another has seizures that result in a broken back. The local police chief (Will Hutton) holds Tyler responsible for the deaths and injuries, and places her under house arrest. Other skeptics dismiss her as just another crazy lady unhinged by early widowhood. Tyler has to battle to be believed - and to save her town from the menace from deep space.

So far, so Fire in the Sky. Tyler is that thriller staple, the working Mom whose borderline neglect of her children (she hasn't learned her son's hockey fixture list by heart!) will be punished. Her tumble from Germanically-coiffed scientist to wild-haired believer is a startling one, and Jovovich doesn't miss a melodramatic beat. Rather than sculpting mountains out of mashed potato, like Richard Dreyfuss and friends in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, she becomes obsessed by electronic recordings of the Sumerian-speaking starmen. Her realization - that they are responsible for a wave of deaths and disappearances in Nome, and have been playing God for millennia with their experiments on the human populace - offers little hope for our race, especially when her investigations anger the aliens. Their retaliation against her family is swift and devastating.

A straightforward re-telling of Dr. Tyler's descent into the abyss would seem hackneyed and implausible; we saw it all in the 1990s and had it debunked (thanks, Santilli!) in the early 2000s. Osunsanmi credits the audience with more sense than to swallow a conventional abduction tale, and acknowledges that the re-enactments are the slick Hollywood version of what "really" happened. The true horror moments in this movie come from the degraded videotape inserts, especially when, thanks to a split screen, they are presented as a direct comparison to the dramatized version. The "real" Dr. Abigail Tyler is a washed out, saucer-eyed, Shelley-Duvall-in-The Shining whack job, recounting her experiences to camera in a monotone nasal whine. Her head bobbles on her spindly body, her voice cracks and her eyes bubble with tears. It's uncomfortable to watch, especially when her brutal version of events plays opposite the smooth reconstruction; this broken, defeated woman is a world away from her screen counterpart, the satiny, green-eyed Milla. Tyler's patients, as recorded on her home video camera, are the ugly older brothers of the comely actors hired to portray them, but their sobbing and spasms feel all the more real for the comparison. Osunsanmi knows that the videotape, blurred, off-centered, and corrupted though it is, will always draw the audience's eyes. Scratchy reality trumps shiny fiction. The truth is out there, and, presented like this, is pretty scary.

The Fourth Kind offers a strange, and sometimes nerve-jangling encounter to movie-goers. The aliens scuttle and screech mostly off-screen, but provide some good startle moments. The true horror is subtler than that, and lies in the gap between what we accept as "true", and the bastardized version we will happily go along with as part of a screen story. Will the marketing campaign that pushes the "fact-based" angle through fake websites make anyone into a believer? Probably not, and it may well anger the abductee community, who object to movie studios messing with their cosmology. The denizens of Nome, Alaska, already seem to be fairly pissed about their portrayal, especially as a lot of the exteriors were shot in Bulgaria. Osunanmni's narrative approach doesn't always work, as the constant mixing of media makes the story-telling somewhat bumpy. Nonetheless, it provides an interesting commentary on the fictionalization process: scruffy interiors get the Crate And Barrel treatment, saggy faces morph into movie star visages, but, ultimately, the most compelling aspects of the story are told via VTR. Coming so close on the heels of Paranormal Activity, The Fourth Kind might easily tap into a new thirst for horror-verité.