Year: 

2009

Directed by: 

Olatunde Osunsanmi

Rated: 

PG-13

Country: 

United States

Runtime: 

1 hr. 38 min.

Production Company: 

Gold Circle Films

Written by: 

Olatunde Osunsanmi

Terry Lee Robbins

Starring: 

Milla Jovovich

Will Patton

Hakeem Kae-Kazim

Elias Koteas

Similar Films: 

Fire in the Sky

Taken

Signs

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.