When Richard Dreyfuss walked onto the Mothership on the finish of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” it was simply concerning the first time — and in addition almost the final — {that a} film hero voluntarily went on any such journey. More acquainted notes of terror and disorientation include the UFO territory of Peter Cilella’s “Descendent.” It has “The Walking Dead’s” Ross Marquand as a working-class Southern Californian whose world comes unglued as soon as he suffers an obvious alien abduction. Occupying the slippery-reality realm of “Jacob’s Ladder,” this efficient first characteristic, debuting at SXSW, limns its protagonist’s unraveling with suspenseful talent.
But these anticipating easy sci-fi horror might resent the writer-director’s insistence on sticking to an ambiguity, performed someplace between the narrative fashions of “Communion” and “Mysterious Skin.” Cilella by no means totally resolves whether or not our protagonist is, certainly, the sufferer of extraterrestrial meddling or as a substitute struggling delusions triggered by delayed childhood-trauma reminiscences, leaving the story suspended in irresolution.
In a small group on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Sean (Marquand) is awaiting the arrival of their first baby with partner Andrea (Sarah Bolger). He appears preoccupied although, partly from fear that he isn’t an preferrred supplier — he has the quite low-end job of a harried safety guard at a neighborhood faculty. Some “well-meaning” varieties of their extended-family circle poorly disguise their view of him as a hapless loser. Nonetheless, Andrea likes her job (no matter that’s), and assures him they’ll be advantageous.
She grows extra involved when her husband wakes up within the hospital. It seems as if he’d fallen off the varsity roof whereas making an attempt to repair an exterior gentle fixture. But Sean recollects a vivid object approaching him out of the sky— then being subjected to invasive procedures in an otherworldly surroundings, alongside different constrained human captives.
Surely that may’t have actually occurred. Doubt is additional seeded by our eventual realization that Sean’s mom died in childbirth and his father took his personal life just a few years later. Is imminent fatherhood dislodging deep-seated insecurities Sean has held again for many years? Yet now he has escalating nightmares, waking visions, seeming flashbacks, blackouts, confessing to “a hard time deciding what’s real and what’s a dream.” He out of the blue develops heightened listening to, enabling him to listen in on distant conversations… although perhaps these are simply hallucinations too. There’s actually no explaining why, regardless of zero prior creative expertise, he begins creating elaborate work and sketches of a disturbingly “alien” nature, usually failing to recall in a while that he’s made them.
“I feel like I’m trapped somewhere far away. I don’t know how to get out, and they won’t let me out” he tells his more and more uneasy spouse. Once her being pregnant develops problems, she worries his psychological absences and erratic conduct have gained priority over her personal time of want. Everybody fears the worst when Sean decides he wants a gun — not a protected accent for an obvious psychological well being disaster.
“Descendent” is excellent at shading the main characters’ misery, as what seems to be a reasonably preferrred partnership (regardless of some outdoors naysayers) will get pried aside by developments neither occasion can management. Marquand’s efficiency is strongly sympathetic — but we’re unsure whether or not to belief him, both. His interactions with authority figures, together with a counselor (Aisha Camille Kabia) and his quite terrible “Aunt” Robin (Susan Wilder), counsel long-term anger points that his marriage had hitherto muffled.
The extra fantastical facets are held in reserve, however can’t be discounted as solely Sean’s invention. When a canine mysteriously seems in his house, it’s precisely just like the one he had as a boy 20 years earlier — and actual sufficient that he should give up its care to greatest buddy Christian (Dan O’Brien).
That unwillingness to resolve the central thriller lends “Descendent” psychological rigidity, but additionally dissipates it after some time, because the movie’s low-key climactic occasions solely reinforce its narrative ambivalence. Nor does the film stylistically select between style piece and character drama, straddling each in a non-hyperbolic method that’s atmospheric, nuanced and well-crafted, if additionally finally slightly irritating.
There’s a deliberation to Cilella’s method that feels astute and attracts on the strong solid’s strengths. But ultimately, chances are you’ll guiltily want he had been much less cagey about simply what has occurred to Sean. Because after 90 minutes or so we — like his family members — have begun to lose persistence with having no concept whether or not he’s a person besieged, or his personal worst downside.
