Recently I rewatched PRIEST (2011) for a podcast – I’ll link to it when the episode goes up. Do you remember that movie, though? Few do, but it’s one I really like, a post-apocalyptic vampire western action movie based on a Korean comic book. The director was Scott Stewart, a visual FX veteran (MARS ATTACKS!, THE LOST WORLD: JURASSIC PARK, THE HOST, RED CLIFF, co-founder of The Orphanage) who broke into directing with the weird angel-related action-horror movie LEGION (2010). Since then he’s directed the pilot for a TV continuation of LEGION called Dominion and a segment of the anthology HOLIDAYS, but only one full length feature: the close encounter movie DARK SKIES (2013). (I almost called it a UFO movie, but that’s not accurate, because we never see a space ship.)

This is the story of a middle class suburban family, the Barretts – real estate agent mother Lacy (Keri Russell, HONEY I BLEW UP THE KID), trying-to-find-a-new-job father Daniel (Josh Hamilton, MAESTRO), teenage son Jesse (Dakota Goyo, DEFENDOR, REAL STEEL) and younger brother Sammy (Kadan Rockett, “Mini Howie Mandel,” America’s Got Talent). They all have their normal human difficulties they’re going through and then one night Lacy gets up and finds the kitchen completely trashed, like an animal got in. Then another night she finds all the objects in the kitchen perfectly stacked and balanced, like a brilliant installation artist got in. And then all the family photos disappear, like a… I don’t know. Like something weird is going on here.

Increasingly bizarre things happen and what else can they do but in the moment be horrified by the inexplicability then in the sunlight the next day try to treat it like a normal problem with a normal way to deal with it. They talk to the cops, re-up their lapsed security system, add cameras. Surely something will work.

There’s a feedback loop of alien stress and normal family problems. Daniel starts to worry about everything they’re spending money on, because he’s behind on mortgage payments and hasn’t been able to find a job since he got laid off, but also he’s very insecure about failing to be a provider, which seems to interfere with his sex life and also makes him lie to Lacy about a job interview going well. Lacy (correctly) gets angry that Daniel has been keeping this stuff from her, so the kids hear them fighting and worry about them getting divorced like some of their friends’ parents. So then when the weird shit happens the parents question whether it’s the kids acting out in response to their marital problems, and the more the parents push at the kids about that the more upset and withdrawn the kids get, especially Jesse, being at that broody young teen stage of life.

He’s already going through it. He’s old enough to be exposed to pot, but young enough to not mind talking to his little brother on a walkie talkie at night. He likes hanging out with an older friend named Ratner (L.J. Benet, Dog With a Blog), an obnoxious douchebag his dad doesn’t want him around. He has a crush on Shelly (Annie Thurman, THE HUNGER GAMES) but is sometimes with her during embarrassing family stuff because she’s the daughter of Lacy’s best friend Karen (Myndy Crist, THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB). When she seems to show interest he’s so inexperienced that he says “you’ve been a bad, bad girl” and manhandles her boob like in SCHOOL GIRLS III, a porno Ratner showed him This is really a bad time for his parents to be fighting and for aliens to be breaking into their house doing wacko alien shit. Fuck off, aliens. These people have lives.

To me this seems like a very POLTERGEIST-inspired movie, and once you realize that you can see there’s a thin line between the supernatural and the science-fictional. The poster brags “FROM THE PRODUCER OF PARANORMAL ACTIVITY AND INSIDIOUS” and shows a bowl-cutted kid being controlled by sinister powers just like one of those did. There’s a series of incidents where normal life is interrupted by escalating weirdness, and instead of being explained by “it’s ghosts” you know it must be some kind of alien technology. Family members sleepwalk, stand frozen with bizarre expressions on their faces, wake up screaming, have nosebleeds, things that could be lifted and placed unchanged into a possession movie.

Two of the big scares I thought “oh yeah, I remember this from the trailer,” but they were still very effective. One is when Lacy is doing a walkthrough to sell a house but goes into a trance and starts mindlessly headbutting a window. Very upsetting! (And it sucks that her boss treats it as a job performance issue instead of a health one.) The other is when she goes to investigate a noise one afternoon and suddenly a bird crashes hard into the window. As she’s peering out at the poor dead thing another bird smacks into the window. Then entire flocks of birds. The concept is creepy as fuck but I believe that a minimum 50% of the scene’s success is down to Russell’s performance, that her little yips of fright sound like real-person-responding-to-being-startled and not movie scream. I really wonder how she does that – I bet they had to surprise her with the timing of the noise but it would still be hard to do with such authenticity when you know it’s coming.

I’ve noticed this before in the movie ANTLERS – Russell really knows how to anchor a crazy-shit-happening-in-a-small-town movie like this. It goes without saying that we all know her as the beloved and iconic RISE OF SKYWALKER character Zorii Bliss, but she has also done acclaimed work starring in television dramas I’m unfamiliar with that aired on FX, WB’s New Tuesday, etc., and I don’t think she knows how to not play the emotions real, so she really grounds this kind of stuff. She could absolutely be a new Kevin Bacon or Ethan Hawke if she enjoys doing these. (Not that she needs the work.)

I’m new to recognizing how good Hamilton is. This is different from his FBI agent role in REALITY but it shares the dorky boy scout exterior with something messier boiling beneath it. Here he exhibits qualities that can make me really hate a character – shame about not living up to traditional masculine ideals manifesting in petty and controlling behavior – but he comes off much more sympathetic, dimensional and redeemable than some actors might’ve.

And there’s another finely tuned performance to mention. When you see the name J.K. Simmons (FOR LOVE OF THE GAME) on the credits it’s easy to guess he’ll be a UFO expert who comes in late in the game. He’s not exactly the Zelda Rubinstein, but similar, the special guest star with the gravitas to rapidly deliver a bunch of confirmation and new information once they finally accept that these are aliens. But I was impressed that he doesn’t play it at all how I pictured. Yes, he’s kind of a burnt out, oddball outcast with a gloomy apartment full of cats and news clippings. But he doesn’t go J. Jonah Jameson. He speaks quiet, gentle, seems sad for them when he realizes they’re for real, knowing what he has to warn them about. Lacy asks what’s so special about them that the aliens are harassing them and he’s apologetic as he explains that really there’s nothing special about them at all, there is no reason to be understood here, no more than a lab rat could understand the experiment they’ve fallen victim to.

That’s the idea at the center of the scares – this shit is gonna happen and you’re not gonna get answers. You’re also not gonna get a long look at these guys, for what it’s worth. Honestly I would’ve loved to but I have to admit that as overblown as I believe the “it’s scarier if it’s left up to your imagination” maxim is I do think this is a case where it’s effective to withhold opportunities to see clearly who’s doing this.

Part of me was hoping it would shift into something more like LEGION and PRIEST, which basically means CG greys climbing all over the walls. That seemed possible when the family started buying shotguns and boarding up the house near the end. It could’ve been fun, might’ve felt like a more satisfying climax, but DARK SKIES remains the slightly less pulpy, more serious-minded movie it was advertised as – a mid-budget programmer, just aiming for something a little fresher and better executed than you might expect from the genre. A Blumhouse movie. At that it succeeds.

PRIEST had been considered a major bomb for Screen Gems, so this might’ve been Stewart showing he could do something cheaper and more normal. It was definitely a hit for its budget, but being more normal meant it did not make a huge impression. But I’m glad it’s there for those of us who can appreciate a Solid Little Genre Exercise™. Come back, Scott Stewart.