The FourthKind’s pseudo-documentary setup seems very Blair Witch and rather unnecessary for a science-fiction horrorshow already creepily compelling in form and content. The story is adistillation of alien abduction lore with ideas of ancient alien contact,dating from the Sumerians at the dawn of human civilization. Wisely, Osunsanmidoesn’t actually show the aliens, although we eventually hear their harsh,inhuman voices on tape (speaking in hard-to-translate Sumerian) and witnesstheir effect on the minds of people they have abducted. Apparently theyresemble pale owls, because the anxious patients who seek help for anxiety in Tyler’s office in Nome, Alaska, always see something“like an owl” peering down at them in their nightmares.
Too many of her patients are having the same baddreams at the same time of night. Tylersees an uncanny pattern, especially when her subjects go utterly berserk underhypnosis to retrieve repressed memories. Or is her quixotic quest, played outby Jovovich with a face of the truly traumatized, the result of her own refusalto accept the recent suicide of her husband, whom she insists was murdered byan intruder?
It’s a good and open-ended plot, set amid the darkwoods and rainy sky of remote Nome,a city plagued in reality by depression and alcoholism. Are the area’s manyunsolved murders and disappearances the result of aliens, the dispiritingclimate or Sarah Palin? As Jovovich intones at the onset: You decide.
Osunsanmi’s daring filmmaking turns the story intomemorably imaginative cinema. Sometimes the “actual” Tylerinterviews are juxtaposed on split screens with Jovovich’s portrayal of thedoctor, “real” voices carry over into the movie and “actual” footage from Tyler’s often horrificsessions with patients are woven into dramatizations. Osunsanmi even makes useof purported police video and 911 recordings. Will Patton portrays anapoplectic sheriff with anger management problems. He blames Tyler when her patients murder their familiesand kill themselves after undergoing her therapy. Aliens are bunk, he rages atdecibels high enough to be heard on Mars.
Too bad about TheFourth Kind’s distracting true-story setup, which no longer works as wellas it might have in the past. When TheBlair Witch Project was released in 1999, search engines weren’t asprolific as nowadays. In 2009, with a few clicks of the mouse, we can begin totrace the fiction to its source in marketing. n
