The Fourth Kind 2009

[4.8/10] As a kid, I would watch the Alien Autopsy video (or rather, a video about that video, and a corny, obviously staged UPN special about a family whose farmhouse was supposedly visited by aliens, and a perpetually dumb show called Sightings that covered all things paranormal. Even at that tender age, I knew that all of this stuff was baloney, despite the breathless coverage as though it were real, but the ideas of these things happening was scary and a little exhilarating, even if deep down I knew it was bunk, and that’s what kept me coming back to it.

The Fourth Kind, at its best, achieves that same psuedo-scariness. There’s moments, despite all the obvious fabrications, that the growl of the supposed alien voices, and the patina of “real life” analogues, and the terrified performances work to unsettle you. It would be frightening to lose time, to find unexplained scars, to have people you know disappear or act out. It would be especially disturbing if you were wont to chalk all of that up to a malevolent, or at least uncaring, “non-human intelligence” that growled and barked in ancient Sumarian.

But the film’s problem is in its desperate attempts to convince you that what it’s depicting is real. There is a self-serious warning from star Milla Jovovitch about the addition of disturbing “real life” primary source materials to the runtime. “Real” names are censored throughout the films. An interview with the “real” Abbey Tyler, the film’s protagonist, is interspersed into the action. And the film closes with the sort of superimposed text that typically provides the epilogue for genuine “based on a true story” movies.

The problem is that this is so plainly a ruse on the part of the filmmakers. Maybe in a pre-Blair Witch period, The Fourth Kind could have pulled something like this off, but even then, the supposedly genuine details seem so implausible that it strains credulity. In particular, the interview with the real Dr. Tyler is well-acted, but obviously being acted. Any movie-goer worth their salt could piece together the touches of craft that go into portraying a disturbed woman that are well done, but a little too neat and specific to be genuine.

But even if it weren’t, the script for The Fourth Kind turns the piece into such a middlebrow paranormal thriller that it doesn't pass the smell test. Even giving some leeway for the way that Hollywood takes copious liberties when adapting real life events, bits of supposedly real verbiage sound too much like standard movie dialogue, the characters involved arrive too conveniently and have stock personas, and the threat escalates in a lumpy but clear three act structure. A naive viewer could ascribe that to the usual Tinseltown contortions of real events when translated to the screen, but at best, that tack would take away the punch and immediacy of the story, and at worst, exposes the whole thing as a farce.

What’s interesting is that if The Fourth Kind had come out ten years later, it would probably be some kind of limited series on a streaming platform, not just because Hollywood makes fewer of these sorts of movies now, but because it so plainly matches the tone and look that have become de rigueur for Netflix and Hulu and Amazon. If you’ve seen The Haunting of Hill House or Castle Rock or other attempts to bring the mature horror sensibility to television, you’ll recognize the same sort of cool blue, quasi-naturalistic aesthetic, the same severity in tone and drama, and the same rank expository dialogue masquerading as sincerity or lyricism.

It also doesn't help that the film comes off like a pastiche of earlier, better works in the horror/paranormal genre. The Fourth Kind borrows the chill of a tree-lined, isolated community, shared delusion, inscrutable gods, and owl-o-phobia of Twin Peaks to much lesser ends. It steals the “experts assembling” and purloined little girl elements from Poltergeist. It takes the unexplained occurrences, ancient civilization call out, and guttural voice from the beyond of The Exorcist. Just about everything The Fourth Kind does, someone else has done much better.

The only things that can the movie can boast are Jovovitch’s performance, which elevates a subpar script, and a handful of good scares, owing more to the bag of usual cinematic tricks or the contemplation of real life horrors than any achievement in storytelling or tension-building. The characters are flat, representing archetypes like the no-nonsense sheriff or the skeptical but helpful friend, each with essentially no arcs to speak of. The wind-up is long and dull, giving the audience few reasons to care about anyone or anything before the spooky stuff begins. And the film’s high-tension moments are contrived and ultimately underwhelming.

Worse still, there is so much flash and so much “extra” in the presentation that feels cheesy. There’s sweeping shots of the Alaskan vista, or camera-spins around a subject, or splitscreens that add very little to the story or mood beyond “look what we can do.” Zooming shots on the speaker of a tape recorder, or repeated swirling shots of a creepy owl, or overly busy little montages only serve to produce a film that seems to have restless leg syndrome. None of these flourishes enhance the film, instead giving it the mere trappings of excitement that the story and characters alone cannot muster.

With that, and the implausibility of the “ripped from real life” conceit, the interjection of “documentary footage” and “primary source materials” into what is nominally a dramatization feels more and more like a pale gimmick, one that weakens the film as a whole. And yet, without them, all this movie would be is a standard issue, middle-of-the-road paranormal thriller, as easily forgotten as it was conjured up. Even then, it might have succeeded better as a straight dramatization, or better yet as a straight up faux documentary, rather than this split-the-baby approach where the efforts at verisimilitude are unconvincing and the efforts at adapted drama are unavailing.

All that leaves the audience with is the horror of the premise, the realization that it would, in fact, be pretty freaky if aliens had spurred the creation myth of ancient civilizations and returned to study us. Like its chintzier network television counterparts of old, all The Fourth Kind can do is draft on its viewers’ tantalizing fear of that sort of thought, rather than on any sort of worthy realization of it.