Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Michael Pearce
Starring: Riz Ahmed, Octavia Spencer, Lucian-River Chauhan, Aditya Geddada, Rory Cochrane
The marketing around Encounter would suggest it's a sci-fi road movie along
the lines of Firestarter and Midnight Special, but in truth it's closer to
more grounded fare like Steven Spielberg's Sugarland Express and Roger
Donaldson's Smash Palace, movies in which parents abscond with their
children, believing rightly or wrongly that they're doing the right
thing.
The film opens in sci-fi territory with a sequence that details alien
spores landing on earth during a meteor shower. These spores embed
themselves in their earthly hosts, setting up what we assume will be a riff
on the old Body Snatchers template.
Our anti-hero, ex-marine Malik (Riz Ahmed), makes the same assumption. He's
come across government documents that he believes suggest aliens are taking
over humans and that as much as half of our population has succumbed at this
stage. Desperate to keep them safe, Malik absconds with his two young sons -
Jay (Lucian-River Chauhan) and Bobby (Aditya Geddada) - from his ex-wife's
home and drives off into the California desert.
What follows is a chase thriller along the lines of the movies I've
mentioned above, but with the added element of ambiguity regarding whether
Malik has genuinely uncovered an alien invasion or is simply mad. I that sense it shares a narrative setup with Ivan Kavanagh's recent thriller Son, which saw a mother flee with her son in the belief she was being chased by an evil cult.
That
ambiguity proves the film's greatest stumbling block as director Michael Pearce
and his co-writer Joe Barton can't find a way to keep us guessing without
relying on narrative cheats. Early on we realise we're in the hands of an
unreliable narrator and the question becomes not whether we should trust the
film's protagonist but whether we should put our faith in a filmmaker who
has cheaply conned us at several points.
It's surprising to see Pearce struggle with this sort of storyline, as with
his excellent debut Beast he managed to brilliantly pull off a similar
setup. That movie featured a character whose intentions we weren't quite
certain of and Pearce thrillingly stretched this idea out to its climax.
Here, despite the misleading crumbs Pearce hopes we'll follow, we figure out
the truth about Malik early on, leaving the rest of the film largely
redundant.
Pearce is bailed out to some degree by two things - the central performance
of Ahmed, who does his best to humanise a wafer-thin character, and the
landscape of the American South West, shot here with the fascination of a
director making their first movie on American soil.
Yet while Ahmed is the
movie's strongest card, his casting requires an extra element of suspension
of disbelief. Maybe I'm overly cynical, but I doubt the US authorities would
treat a fugitive Muslim man as affably as they do here, particularly in the
light of some of Malik's actions. Octavia Spencer is wasted as Malik's parole officer, yet another
of those Momma Bear roles filmmakers keep casting her in. Didn't anyone see
Ma?
