Walking out of “The Fourth Kind,” whispers could be heard across the theater: “Do you think it’s real?”
The film opens with Milla Jovovich as herself speaking directly to the audience. She explains that everything that follows is based on archival footage, voice recordings and eyewitness accounts.
The film blends the footage with the dramatization, switching from one to the other and juxtaposing them in split screen, the voices overlapping in tone and cadence.
Initially, the approach seemed too gimmicky. But as the film progressed, this technique accomplished exactly what it set out to do. I found myself questioning the unquestionable.
It all seemed too coincidental.
“The Fourth Kind” follows Dr. Abigail Tyler (Jovovich) as she attempts to finish a sleep disorder study in Nome, Alaska, which her recently murdered husband had started. Each of her patients claims to have seen a white owl outside their window around 3:30 a.m. that won’t let them sleep, but it’s not until Dr. Tyler hypnotizes them that things get crazy.
Within the first 15 minutes, the film turns up the tension to something painful. Who would have thought that hypnosis scenes could be suspenseful?
By integrating the archival footage so fully with the dramatization, writer and director Olatunde Osunsanmi allows the audience to continually check into reality. The film never hits you over the head with its conclusions because it doesn’t draw any of its own. In fact, the most reliable characters in the film end up as skeptics.
None of the aliens are anything more than you might see in YouTube clips. They are shadows or strange noises. They are dark spaces that align in the framework of the story like a constellation composed of dark matter, drawing out a sketchy representation of reality without ever showing its full form.
One shortcoming of the integrated footage is that the actors are held too closely accountable for their real-world counterparts. In most cases this matters little, but with Jovovich, the dissimilarities were often jarring.
Dr. Tyler is a fragile waif staring blankly ahead for most of the film while Jovovich has made her career portraying superhuman, zombie- or mutant-killing women.
You can fill in the blanks as to why she was miscast. But, the film doesn’t hinge on its acting talent. It manages the tension so perfectly that Tyler could have been played by a saltine cracker.
I went into this film with very low expectations, and it gave me a kick that I couldn’t help but enjoy. I have no idea what this archival footage is. Is it real? Probably not, but I don’t care to know. It’s a movie, and for 90 minutes, I lived the life of an abduction paranoid. If that’s right up your alley, I recommend you do the same.
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