It’s difficult to tell what director Olatunde Osunsanmi is ultimately trying to do with The Fourth Kind. The film tells the story of a psychologist, Dr. Abbey Tyler, who experienced horrifying and devastating events in the form of extra-terrestrial contact. It is presented as half documentary and half dramatization of true events, intercutting purportedly real audio and video recordings from Dr. Tyler’s files with footage of professional actors and actresses portraying the events. The film's strategies alternate among trying to frighten the audience, depress them, or convince them that these things really happened. What results is an occasionally scary movie that presents a sad scenario but doesn’t do much to make us care about it. With unconvincing “archival” footage, you likely won’t leave with any new opinions of extra-terrestrial life, either.

To try to convince us that what we are seeing is a reenactment of true events, lead actress Milla Jovovich tells the audience up front that she is only an actress and will be portraying Abbey Tyler, the supposedly real person to whom these things happened. The story begins when Tyler, who lives in the small town of Nome, Alaska, suddenly has patients complaining about attacks of restlessness and apprehension in the middle of the night. Peculiarly, they all also claim to see a white owl staring in at them through the window. It soon becomes apparent that this owl is an alien. As Tyler begins investigating the claims and putting her patients under hypnosis, bizarre things start to happen. Patients begin talking about beings visiting them in their rooms at night and speaking Sumerian in inhuman voices. As the phenomena escalate, one man, while under hypnosis, floats off the bed and breaks his back. Later, the unthinkable happens: Tyler’s daughter is abducted. This is an event that will mentally and emotionally cripple Tyler for the rest of her life.

So that I could assess this movie as a movie, I purposely did not research the claims of this film. I don’t know how true the events portrayed in this movie are, and I don’t technically know whether any of the archival footage is real, but most of it certainly appears fake. The video footage appears to be of better quality than actual VHS recordings – especially considering that the tapes would be nearly thirty years old – and the imperfections in the picture seem to be digitally inserted. Further implicating the probably false nature of these tapes is a loud pop on the audio that occurs at the exact moment that jump scares occur. It seems too coincidental to be genuine. Finally, throughout the film, we are shown footage of Osunsanmi himself interviewing the real version of Dr. Tyler. The picture on these parts of the movie is of low quality, too, with a distinctly blocky look, but there is no discernible reason why. My best guess is that Osunsanmi is trying to convince us that this portion of the film, too, is non-fictional, but if that was the case, the footage should appear as clean as that of any documentarian. This is a significant blunder that puts the whole film in doubt – if you believed it might be true in the first place. So, if Osunsanmi’s goal in this movie is simply to convince us that these things happened, he has not succeeded, and the result is that audiences will be distracted from the story beneath the images.

Horror seems to be one of the movie’s primary goals, but it is only intermittently scary. There is certainly an eerie feel throughout the film, but the moments that actually frighten are sparse, and most of them are jump scares. They often consist of archival footage of subjects suddenly sitting upright or screaming, accompanied by the aforementioned pop. When their bodies float and contort, the footage is unsettling, but it quickly becomes distorted beyond that point at which one can tell what is going on (due to some sort of interference caused by the aliens’ presence). The characters’ bodies and faces can at times become disturbingly unnatural, but we see such things only two or three times in the film. There are scary things that occur in this movie for sure, but there are not enough of them to make it enjoyable for its fear factor alone.

Perhaps to heighten the film’s horror, Osunsanmi also seems to be trying to make his movie as depressing as possible. Throughout it all, he creates a sense of dread and hopelessness, established initially by the empty countenance of the "real" Dr. Tyler as she is interviewed by Osunsanmi. To keep the momentum of the dread, the director has made sure that there is not a single upbeat character in the film. Then, upon Tyler’s daughter’s abduction, the sadness hits its pinnacle. Tyler’s world immediately breaks apart, and she becomes numb to almost everything except the desire to have her daughter back. To do so, she will attempt the unthinkable, and this leads to her final psychological breakdown, from which she never recovers. The overwhelming sense of sadness is portrayed well by the actresses (and, occasionally, actors), but it is impossible to fully empathize with the Tyler's character because, due to the way the events are told, she has not undergone any sort of growth or development. All we see is a mentally disturbed woman recounting the things that happened to her, followed by an actress reenacting the events. The change that she undergoes is not one that we can feel or understand because we have not been given the chance to relate to her. So, the sadness of Dr. Tyler does not enhance the horror of the movie because we cannot fully feel that sadness ourselves. We merely see it.

For their part, the lead roles – Jovovich and whoever plays Dr. Tyler in her “real” form, assuming it is an actor – are completely convincing. Jovovich constantly wears the calm demeanor of a psychologist, until the unexplained begins to happen. At that point she breaks down, but her cries are never melodramatic. When her daughter is taken from her, her inability to mentally deal with the situation is perfectly portrayed by her hysteria. On the other hand, in the footage of the real Tyler, the character is always subdued, held down by an oppressive sadness. Her intonation sounds distinctly natural, and her face is held hopelessly blank. We may be unable to feel what the character is feeling, but it takes zero effort to understand the intensity of Tyler’s emotions and the extent of her mental incapacitation.

What we have with The Fourth Kind is a movie that does a handful of things right but that cannot combine them into a unitary whole. It provides a so-so “What if?” to think about on your way home but little more. I think this film may have worked better as straight-up fiction. Many of its scenes remind me of The Exorcist, which did not claim to be true at all but which nonetheless scared audiences silly. The Fourth Kind, through its style, renders itself incapable of presenting a measured, fleshed-out plot, and it simultaneously relies on viewers believing it is true in order to scare them. Unfortunately, it does not do a good enough job of convincing us of this and is therefore left with little to scare us with.