★½
“Dark, more like.”
Fair play to Woollard and his team for making a feature movie with no resources to speak of. The problem is, watching this, it’s painfully obvious that they had no resources to speak of. Two space-suits and a fog machine are not enough for a film, especially in a genre like science-fiction, which tends to rely on spectacle. Oh, smaller scale works can still be remarkably successful: the night before this, I watched glorious and highly recommended time-travel film Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes. But if you’re not going to offer epic scale, you need to have something else to repay the audience. An hour and three-quarters of watching characters stumbling about in the gloom is not it.
I was lured in by this synopsis: “After crash-landing in an escape pod on a dark and misty planet, a mother is hunted by an alien creature which is drawn to the lights she must use to find her missing son.” That high concept sounds pretty cool, and I hoped I was in line for an action heroine take on Pitch Black, perhaps. It just never materializes. There are, indeed, two women who have crash-landed: Tallie (Lilly) and Nia (Ann-Roche, under the name of Chrissy Randall). It’s the latter who is desperately seeking her son, Luccas, only to be hampered by the presence of the hungry creature. She and Tallie have some things in common. However, it’s what separates them, which might be more important.
Turns out the pair’s presence on the planet is not coincidental, because the monster’s excrement is a precious stone – think oysters and how they make pearls. Some parties therefore have a definite interest in providing a steady stream of sustenance for it. However, the potentially interesting ideas here are utterly undone by the woeful execution. 90% of the scenes are one or other woman, shot in close-up to try and hide the lack of scale, while they talk to each other over the radio. It’s boring after about ten minutes of this. The bad news is, you’ve got another hour and twenty of the same thing, before they finally come into each other’s presence for a (brief) spot of plot resolution. Don’t expect to be impressed by the creature, either.
It’s never a good sign when you have to read the director’s comments on Reddit to make sense of a film. I also learned the film was a metaphor for illegal immigration. Yeah. That whirring sounds is this legal immigrant’s eyes rolling. On the plus side, it’s muddied enough in its plotting that this was unclear at the time, so I guess it wasn’t heavy-handed, albeit more through incompetence than design. Admittedly, I may potentially have tuned-out during the scenes which alluded to this moral topic. However, if a film is going to do such a dismal job at holding my attention, I don’t feel responsible for missing out on any nuances of plot.
Dir: Matt Woollard
Star: Christine Ann-Roche, Gia Lily, Tedroy Newell. James Woollard