When it comes to aliens, extra-terrestrials, life out there, or whatever you want to call it, I am a firm believer and for anyone that likes that kind of stuff The Fourth Kind is right up your alley.
Now, I am not a cultist or of the belief that aliens are inherently violent or want to destroy us all, I am just convinced that there has to be life out there. As the saying goes, if there is nothing out there, it sure seems like an awful waste of space. But the mystery in question here is of the violent nature and causing problems for the city of Nome, Alaska. The film opens by breaking the fourth wall with actress Mila Jovovich who stars as the proposed real life psychologist Abigail Tyler. Tyler apparently uncovered some disturbing secrets in the minds of some of her patients who have all been suffering from sleep disorders and have an identical recollection of an owl in the wee hours of the morning that they identify with their loss of sleep. The study is a continuation of the work Abigail’s husband was doing who was murdered in his sleep a few months earlier while in the middle of the same study. After putting one of her patients under hypnosis, Tyler, begins to discover something darker to these peoples sleeping issues and suppressed memories that she can’t really explain.
Now, all of this is inter cut and infuses “real” footage and audio recordings made throughout the study while we are watching the dramatization of these events by the actors. The editing and style the film is presented in is done extremely well and the flow back and forth is usually done through split screen and slick transitions that work fairly well. When we get down to the most disturbing scenes we almost always view them through the archival “real” footage and even through the distortion and unclarity of the images they provide some positively creepy thrills.
Half of the fun in the film comes from you simply trying to figure out whether this is all real or a put on for effect to heighten the terror in the film. In fact, all of the video’s and audio recordings are done extremely well and again the editing and visual cues the director puts on screen to acknowledge that we are now experiencing a real tape works very well. The weakest part of the film, besides the implausible confusion around the fate of Abigail’s husband in her mind, is the apparently “real” interview that the real Abigail Tyler has with the director of this film, Olatunde Osunsanmi. I just had a really hard time believing and buying into Abigail Tyler as being a real person. The footage we are shown is very convincing and creepy but coming back to her time and time again left me thinking, “I don’t know about this?” Though, by the end of the film I still had this feeling in my gut that this might be real and I suggest you go into the film and judge for yourself before investigating the validity on the inter-webs as I think a lot of the fun in the picture is trying to figure that out.
The actors in the film all do a great job, if the “real” footage is fake then those actors deserve great accolades and the possible actress who plays Tyler really shines in her archival scenes if she doesn’t convince in the interview. Jovovich does a nice job playing the quiet and reserved Tyler in the dramatization scenes and parallels the footage reportedly shot during the study. Elias Koteas is good as well as Tyler’s therapist and serves as our perspective on the material as it unfolds and we slowly begin to believe. Will Patton also delivers some fine work as a non-believing cop who tries and be sympathetic but grows more and more tired with Tyler as more and more bad things happen around her.
In the end, whether a gimmicky trick or not, Olatunde Osunsanmi’s The Fourth Kind has a number of solid scenes and some terrifying moments. Half the fun of the film is trying to figure out if you buy into all this being real or not and it will get you to jump regardless of your belief as things get weirder and weirder as the film moves along. Solid turns by the actors help keep this potentially silly premise hold together and props to Osunsanmi for not giving into convention and giving us something fresh and different. While by no means the best alien film ever, it is definitely a fun and solid little horror flick that makes you at least ponder the potential truth behind all of this madness. Shame this is coming out a week after Halloween, at least you can keep the scary holiday spirit alive this weekend if you are into the whole alien’s exist thing.
The Fourth Kind is a B-