‘What if dad made it all up?‘
Despite a long standing, if waning, devotion to the Star Wars franchise, sci-fi really isn’t my thing. When the genre starts to veer into darker territory as with Alien, The Terminator and Ex-Machina, I’m usually on board, but the harder sci-fi stuff does nothing for me really. Hence my lack of enthusiasm for the work of Denis Villeneuve. Encounter has moments of darkness, but it’s too derivative and too simple a premise to justify a nearly two hour feature film…
Malik Khan (Riz Ahmed) is either suffering from paranoid delusions that cause him to kidnap his two children to embark on some mad road trip, or parasitical aliens have actually invaded Earth and Malik is the only person that realises. Hattie Hayes (Octavia Spencer), Malik’s parole officer, tries to protect him and his children from the long arm of the law, but he can’t run forever.
A potentially interesting premise then but one that has been explored many times in the past. A central question of whether what we are seeing is real or exists only in the mind of the protagonist is not an original concept. Here, it is executed only semi successfully despite a spirited performance from Ahmed and a strong turn from the two child actors alongside him (Aditya Geddada and Lucian-River Chauhan).
Encounter is competently acted, but writer-director Michael Pearce doesn’t do enough to shake the feeling that this could have been a TV movie. He has also picked up the annoying habit of shooting everything in darkness which makes it difficult to fully appreciate what is happening. An average film in every sense of the word.