Cinematical

There's nothing like a good midnight screening of an alien abduction flick to really get your film festival off to a good start, so when I saw Fredrick Wolcott's Beings on the schedule, I knew I wanted to check it out. The film was preceded by a fun little short called Coming to Town, which is about two Santas -- a naughty one and a nice one. The nice one is the jolly old St. Nick we know and love; the naughty one drives an old, beat up car while chugging booze from the bottle, accompanied by a grungy drunkard of an elf and a violent, nasty little leprechaun. Naughty Santa has come to answer a plea for revenge from a chubby girl who's being bullied, and the result is darkly hilarious.

Then we settled in for Beings, which was preceded by a warning that the film could cause seizures in people with epilepsy and severe vertigo for the rest of us -- and the warning didn't lie. The first ten minutes or so of the film, I started to feel dizzy and nauseated just from the motion and flashing on the screen. The premise of the film is that a UFO has crashed in a sea in Russian territory. The spaceship was equipped with video surveillance equipment throughout the ship, and Russian scientists have been able to restore video footage from the alien vessel (in a handy plot twist, the aliens used video technology surprisingly similar to our own).

The footage the scientists retrieve is terribly disturbing -- so bad that the Russian government decides to share it with the president of the United States. It shows four young college students, two male and two female, who have been abducted and held aboard the ship, being subjected to experimentation by the aliens. From this point, the point of view of the film shifts to the retrieved footage, so that we are watching the events unfold from the aliens' perspective.
The aliens select for abduction four friends: Whit (Jonny Mars) and Marina (Parisa Fakhri), who are living together, and their friends Terry (Maura Murphy) and Bruce (Christopher Dimock), who are hanging out with them on that fateful night. The aliens come and take them, and the friends wake up aboard a freaky, organic spaceship. We're not shown the footage in strictly linear order; Wolcott shifts things around, creating a discombobulated feel that tries to generate the sense of anxiety and not knowing what's happening that you might feel if you were, yourself, abducted by aliens. In that sense, the film does not have a strong narrative flow; one minute Whit and Bruce are huddled naked in a cell, the next they're being dipped in a vat of what looks like acid, which creates a living "skin suit" that grows over their bodies, taking them over. One minute they're with Marina, running through the ship trying to escape; the next they're strapped to examining tables being probed and prodded in most unpleasant ways.

Wolcott doesn't make any judgments on whether the aliens' intent is good, bad or indifferent, and he keeps you guessing; just when you might start to to feel they're basically just researchers studying humans like we study rats or monkeys, they'll pull some psychological trip, or stick a drill up someone's nose, or dissect them like a frog in a ninth-grade biology lab -- things that make you cringe and question if they're really just being deliberately cruel.

The film has a vibe that reminded me a lot of Cube, a 1997 film about seven strangers who wake up and find themselves trapped in a giant cube made of a bunch of interlocking cubes connected with booby-trapped doors, with a little of the sense of claustrophobia and being pursued of The Descent and a dash of Whitley Strieber's Communion thrown in for good measure. Yet in spite of the borrowing from those and other sci-fi movies, Beings has a totally unique feel. It's a very intense and experimental-type film; there's not a lot of character development, there's no narrative flow, and there are as many questions as answers by the end, but the overall impact is quite effective in putting you mentally into that space of how it might feel to be an alien abductee. Sci-fi fans and folks who are into UFOs and alien abduction stories will probably find the film, which was based heavily on extensive research and interviews with people who claim to be abductees, to be a worthwhile psychological head-trip.