*SPOILER ALERT*
(2009. dir: Olatunde Osunsanmi) We all know about alien abductions, right? the night-terrors, the unexplained lights and paralysis, the lost time, and, eventually, with courage, working through the memory-lapses to find salvation in truth. Right?
Well, forget your slanty-eyed greys and the lab-coat examinations, your antiseptic, minor implants and radiation burns. What if that false screen-memory of the owl outside your bedroom window is NOT there to block out a scientific, invasive but basically even-keeled little smooth-headed alien dude who wants to know more about your anatomical makeup? what if it's there to preserve your sanity against repeated molestations by ancient Sumerian demigods who are both insane and running rampant in a tiny, isolated community? always during the three o'clock hour, the hour of late-night anxieties, of hagridden nightmares, the "hour of the wolf"?
A movie compiled, sometimes simultaneously in split-screen, of dramatizations and "actual footage" (in the sense that old World Wrestling Federation matches can be generously called "actual footage"), it manages to deliver some creepy discomfort, largely through admirable underplaying from Milla Jovovich and Elias Koteas as Alaskan psychologists trying to make sense of a widespread sleeping disorder which involves shared hallucinations of a barn owl. If the most effective thing a horror film can do is to convince us, if only for a moment, that this world of mundanities in which we spend our days exists alongside and hard up against a Lovecraftian world of madness, horror and tentacles, and only our rhino-skin-solid walls of psychological denial, no doubt evolved from sheer necessity, allow us to continue living in it, then this movie achieves some measure of success.
As in much of the most effective horror, the bulk of the fear leaps up from suggestion, as the video footage is mostly obscured by static when the entities are present. The rest of it comes with the hypnosis sessions, in which puzzled victims are led back into lost memories and wake screaming, hyperventilating, real Arthur Machen type terror, the kind where a person is ready to claw their eyes out rather than look again on what they've just seen. Let's hand it to these actors, then, particularly to Corey Johnson and Enzo Cilenti, for some really convincingly Grand Guignol, hair-whitening panic, in the old, relentless, Dionysian sense. They had me fully creeped out. I had a hard time walking into the darkest corner of my bedroom after watching it.
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