CULT MOVIE REVIEW: The Fourth Kind (2009)

COMMENTARY: In terms of UFO stories, there is this strange tradition in the modern cinema of the pseudo-documentary: a film that mixes stock footage of purported flying saucer sightings with newly-filmed, "dramatized" material. For three decades, the "real" and the staged have been mixed in movie ventures including Target: Earth?, a film which featured actor Victor Buono playing an alien, plus real scientists including Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov. The 1970s and early 1980s truly represented the heyday of UFO pseudo-documentary explorations like that, including UFOs: It Has Begun (1976), UFOs are Real (1979), UFO-Exclusive (1979) and UFO Syndrome (1981). In the same decade, there were also a number of pseudo-documentaries pursuing author Erich von Däniken's popular hypothesis about "ancient astronauts" visiting man in pre-history, the whole Chariot of the Gods (1970)/In Search of Ancient Astronauts (1973) approach.

Surprisingly, the year 2009 brought a dedicated revival of these "alien encounter" formats with a new twist, director Olatunde Osunsanmi's out-and-out horror effort The Fourth Kind.  Here, the filmmakers have also adopted The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity's (2009) marketing scheme: selling their genre film as being entirely based on fact. The truth, of course, is that all the "authentic archival footage" featured throughout the film, captured by police cameras, home video cameras and other sources is staged; prepared exclusively for this movie. Like the first-person camera approach of Paranormal Activity, this conceit is designed specifically to scare viewers, to make audiences believe that what it is witnessing is authentic. The underlying conceit here is incredibly interesting, if a little complex. Director Osunsami employs split-screens on several occasions to place purportedly "real" archival footage (say of a police hostage situation on a front porch, side-by-side with his staged representation/re-enactments of the same moments. The trick, of course, is that both incidents are staged for the film; both are faked. Yet placed side-by-side in one frame-- with one heightened artificial image reinforcing the authenticity of the other -- audiences are asked to seek out the visual differences between grainy home video and apparent Hollywood confabulation. In this hunt, our eyes conclude that the home video is realistic, and actually buy into that (false) footage as being truthful. In other words, Osunsami deliberately deploys slightly-exaggerated Hollywood artifice to make us believe in the veracity of the cheap, home video material. And he's largely successful in his clever game too.

Indoctrinated in everything from America's Funniest Home Videos to Cops to World's Wildest Police Videos, modern TV and film viewers have come to instinctively trust the shaky, grainy, cheap approach to filmmaking, and, oppositely, inherently distrust the more accomplished, romantic, Hollywood approach. The latter is exemplified here by the presence of movie star Milla Jovovich in the lead role of Dr. Abigail Tyler, a woman who uncovers a rash of alien abductions in Nome, Alaska during the first five days of October, 2000. Modern audiences crave and subscribe to naturalism in films these days, eschewing artifice and theatricality as much as possible. This movie encourages that impulse; asking us to reject the artifice of the Jovovich dramatizations and believe the naturalism (the lie) of the 911 tapes, the police camera videos, the home video sources, and so forth.

Case in point: our main character. The Fourth Kind also presents another woman as the real Dr. Abigail Tyler, and let's just say, to paraphrase Wes Craven's Scream, she's no Milla Jovovich. Presented in an archival video "interview" from Chapman University (with director Osunsanmi, no less), we come to believe this unglamorous woman as "the real thing" because she is awkward, halting, relatively unattractive, and distinctly un-movie star-like. Of course, she's an actress made to appear that way. This is where the movie proves genuinely smart. The "staged" re-enactment of scenes feature lovely Jovovich looking great and sexy in her stylish wardrobe, playing out hypnosis regression scenes against backgrounds that are more romantic, more affluent than what we see in the home video. Osunsanmi deliberately plays up the exaggerated production design in these sequences; they are an artist's heightened version of reality and audiences detect that fakery. Thus the documentary footage, lensed in less elaborate, less-stylish surroundings, seem increasingly real. The supposedly "documentary," archival footage moments deploy available light, less attractive actors than Hollywood would permit, poorer sound, and more naturalistic blocking and camera work. People step out of frame. The blocking cuts off heads during shots, action occurs off-screen, at the corners of perception, etc.

It takes about twenty-three minutes or so for the head to get accommodated to The Fourth Kind's fashion of operating, and audiences must endure a cheesy opening by Jovovich, directly addressing the audience. She comes out of a blurry fog, as if awakening from a dream, and breaks the fourth wall. But here's the thing: we must remember that this is all part of the format and genre (the UFO pseudo-documentary) too. Hollywood "stars" (often slumming it, in need of a paycheck) were always asked to front this goofball stuff with all sincerity and pomposity, whether it was Jose Ferrer, Burgess Meredith or Rod Serling.

And Osunsanmi is uncannily skilled even at excavating the right visuals in the movie's re-enactments too. For instance, he finds exactly the right shot during a domestic dining room scene to visually express the absence of Tyler's husband, Will (who has died under mysterious circumstances). He also forges a scintillating sense of uneasiness and scope with the first shots of Tyler arriving in picturesque Nome, an isolated town that can only be reached by airplane. You get the impression from Tyler's flight over Nome -- an outcropping of human technology and community blanketed on all sounds by green mountain ranges -- that the town is the perfect "test tube" environment for alien abduction and experimentation. And no one has to say a word about that idea for it to carry thematic currency.

Occasionally, the movie missteps, no doubt. Early on, there's a crisply-edited montage of hypnosis sequences featuring three of Tyler's clients as they all discuss exactly the same thing: a menacing white owl watching them from their bedroom windows. The montage, a time-saving measure, actually deprives us of Abigail's "learning curve." It's the wrong technique for the sequence because the audience should gradually learn that all of her insomniac clients have experienced an identical terror, the presence of the owls actually a mnemonic avatar for the extra-terrestrials. And the audience should see this unnerving truth dawn on Abigail slowly too. Instead, by cutting between three separate hypnosis sessions at lightning speed, there's no sense of learning, no graduation of suspense, no escalation of terror. It's one of the few scenes in the movie that absolutely doesn't work.

Yet what does work, remarkably well, actually, is Osunsanmi's "documentary"-style footage, which -- at about the forty-five minute point -- kicks off into absolute horror when two patients, named Tommy (Corey Johnson) and Scott (Enzo Cilenti) are regressed to the time of their alien abductions. These actors, and the ones in the side-by-side "documentary scenes", featured in split-screen, do an absolutely amazing job of expressing terror, using only their body movements to carry the scares. You actually think they are experiencing alien-generated seizures or spasms.

And then, later, we see archival footage of Scott actually being "possessed" by an alien and the static-ridden, rolling video footage provides a psychic jolt. Against your better judgment, you may feel frightened or at least unnerved) and in part it is because of Osunsanmi's conceit of pitting the documentary-style faked stuff against the Hollywood-style faked stuff.  Especially admirable is the way that the film attempts to bring in the Chariot of the Gods aspect of the form, by explicitly referencing Sumerian cuneiform and artwork. Again, some people may claim that this subplot is a real stretch in believability (that ancient astronauts or aliens formed our race's perception of "God"), but the movie is working in a specific genre and therefore must abide by the rules of that genre.

By and large, critics absolutely hated The Fourth Kind. There are two important reasons for this, and they have nothing to with the technical skill or entertainment value of The Fourth Kind. The first is that many modern journalists/critics may not be familiar with the style and history of the UFO pseudo-documentaries of the 1970's, and thus don't understand the genre the film is deliberately and delicately aping. They have no idea that this is an updating of a historica movie form. Therefore, they have no way to put The Fourth Kind into any kind of meaningful context for their readers. And secondly -- by and large -- critics really, really don't like to be tricked or out-smarted by movies. They don't want to admit, essentially, that a movie has gotten one over on them (which is why they all watch M. Night Shyalaman movies obsessed with picking apart a so-called trick ending...whether there is one or not). Therefore, it is easier to belittle or dismiss that which they don't "get." For example, many critics found the "dramatizations" of The Fourth Kind to be cumbersome, and the Hollywood scenes over-designed. Yet this is the crux of the issue; it's the point of the movie. It's a leitmotif. The Fourth Kind encourages our eyes to note the unrealistic, romantic affluence of Abigail's surroundings, so typical of Hollywood movies since at least the 1990s), and then note, by side-by-side comparison, the relative naturalism of the archival, supposedly-documentary footage. In that distance between staged, A-movie re-enactment and "direct cinema"-style documentary footage, the movie pushes its viewers to believe the veracity of the latter over the former. The point is to scare us silly and, again, as a horror film, The Fourth Kind is supremely effective on that front.

The Fourth Kind is never obvious. We make out enough here to be horrified, and to get a general visual impression of what is occurring. But critically, we're never spoon fed CGI-close-ups of aliens for instance, in The Fourth Kind. We are asked, instead -- again in cheesy pseudo-documentary format -- to consider simply what we have seen, and what we believe. And yes, it is a little cheesy, but once again: that's the nature of the form. It is part and parcel of the pseudo-documentary paradigm. We don't have hard proof of UFO alien abductions, so what we're left with is earnest "believers" like Milla Jovovich, (or in the earlier instances, Rod Serling, Jose Ferrer or Burgess Meredith) building a spine-tingling but sensational case for us.

The Fourth Kind involves some splendid trickery and it is a good, effective horror movie. It won't make you believe in alien abductions or UFOs, but it will scare you. The exciting thing is the fashion in which it visually generates its overaching mood of terror. Here, something as simple as an audio-tape recording that starts normally and drifts off suddenly into nightmare territory is more than enough; thanks especially to the way the director laboriously sets-up and rigorously maintains his real/fake dynamic. He is aiming at something deeper too, and this is seen in the explicit comparison of the aliens to "God."  Specifically,  humans deeply fear being powerless in their own lives. The Fourth Kind gets at that idea; how our sense of purpose, superiority and direction is undercut if there are indeed "higher beings" acting upon us with impunity and without mercy. Our human connections (to our children, for example), mean nothing if we're just laboratory rats. It's the same kind of horror that The Mothman Prophecies generated so expertly. Movies like these succeed in making the human experience, and the bounds of human knowledge, seem terribly small.

Is The Fourth Kind's all-out attempt to subvert our "truth radar" just some intellectual game? Perhaps so, but in vetting this particular game, the director of The Fourth Kind has successfully updated a genre (the UFO pseudo-documentary) and breathed new life into the mockumentary or found footage horror film. Taken on its own terms, and in the right context, The Fourth Kind is a powerful and well-made horror film.