displaymili.blogg.se

His onetime escape - watching the Park skaters who appear to him as lyrical athletes - is lost. Though Alex can't tell anyone about the accident, he's haunted by it in the form of ghastly crime scene photos and grisly flashbacks. Following Alex from shimmery school hallways to the skate park pulsing with energy, Christopher Doyle's handheld camera never pushes hard, but looks gently into Alex's eyes or tags along with him on the sidewalk, as if wondering how he came to be so sad and baffled. “Encounter” is streaming now on Amazon Prime and playing at Silverspot Cinema in Coconut Creek.įor more of Boca magazine’s arts and entertainment coverage, click here.Gus Van Sant's film is as lovely and evocative as any he's made. And there’s no vaccine for institutional neglect. If he isn’t, he is a tragic victim of a broken VA health system. If Malik is correct about everything, we’re certainly doomed. Pearce, who co-wrote the film with Joe Barton, is interested in how wild ideas fester and metastasize, and particularly how ill-equipped our institutions, from the military to law enforcement, are in dealing with the stigma of mental illness. But the larger issues it raises extend beyond the purview of genre fiction. The film takes a bit too many narrative shortcuts to move the action along, and it’s a less interesting picture once it fully plays its hand. There’s an interactive quality to “Encounter,” because the extent in which you believe Malik depends on how conspiracy-minded you are to begin with.

Is Malik a kidnapper or hero? A protector of his family or a destroyer of it? These are the questions “Encounter” explores through its shifty storytelling, as Malik’s subjective experience meshes indistinguishably with the objective reality around him. He was convicted for assaulting a superior in the armed forces, and that volcanic side to his personality occasionally crops up when dealing with his children. When he tells his boys he’s calling his “base,” he’s really dialing his parole officer, Hattie (a compassionate Octavia Spencer). He’s been in prison, not serving his country, for the past two years. Malik, however, is an unreliable narrator. When Malik is pulled over by the police at 3 a.m., we see “X-Files”-style black oil slithering around the officer’s irises the eyes, Malik believes, are key to spotting infection. (“It’s just a bug-don’t worry about it,” the stepfather ensures the two boys). His ex-wife (Janina Gavankar) is bitten by an insect we subsequently see her retching into a toilet. Signs that Malik may in fact be humanity’s lone savior appear in droves.

Armed with a handgun, a body spray that will keep them safe from infection, and elaborate renderings of the insects’ physiology, he’s planning to spirit them away to the only safe haven in the country, Groom Lake, Nevada-which, while never mentioned, UFO enthusiasts will recognize as the home of Area 51. Malik appears at the Oregon home of his estranged ex-wife and two young boys (Lucian-River Chauhan and Aditya Geddada) for the first time in two years, plucking them out of bed in the dead of night for a “family road trip” that he sees as a rescue mission. A mosquito punctures the flesh of a human, sending a diaphanous pathogen into its accommodating host, and we’re off to the pandemic races.īut only one man seems to have the knowledge of this stealth extraterrestrial invasion: Decorated Marine Corps veteran Malik Khan (Riz Ahmed).

It opens with an image of an object blazing through the night sky, crashing somewhere amid the fruited plane. “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” Whether attributed to Delmore Schwartz, Henry Kissinger or Joseph Heller, this adage has transcended its origins, attaining fresh relevance whenever the world seems to spin off its axis, when governments lose credibility, when conspiracy theories blanket the populace like light pollution.Īs we are fully enmeshed in one of these cycles now, Michael Pearce’s sci-fi psychodrama “Encounter” feels ideally suited to the zeitgeist.