"Unidentified Objects" - Fantastic Fest Film Review
There has always been something mystifying about the roadtrip flick. The always-shifting sense of space and time, the loneliness of the highways, and the seemingly forgotten towns that pop up along the way all add to the magical, otherworldly experience. This timelessness is the perfect backdrop for the alien abduction plot of Unidentified Objects.
Peter (Matthew Jeffers) and Winona (Sarah Hay) are strangers, but neighbors. They’ve passed each other in the hallway of their building, but they don’t know each other. It’s what makes Winona’s proposal all the more odd: she wants to borrow Peter’s car so she can drive to Canada to be reunited with the aliens that abducted her when she was a teenager. The aliens have contacted her and given her a meeting time and place. If Winona misses it, she’ll never have another chance to join the aliens.
Unidentified Objects Film, LLC
Respect is at the core of Unidentified Objects. The film recognizes how often people don’t extend a sense of respect to strangers, and how they can hold back because they’re so accustomed to being treated rudely. Peter’s curmudgeonly persona is a defense he’s built from the (likely) daily micro and macro aggressions he experiences as a little person. He isolates himself so he doesn’t have to know the pain of someone he cares about letting him down. It’s a preventative measure that closes him off to the totality of his own existence, but one that’s easiest for him.
There are moments of magical realism sprinkled throughout the film. The lines between reality and hope are blurred multiple times in an effort to match Winona’s quest to make it to the abduction point at the specified time. Quite honestly, Unidentified Objects doesn’t need these dalliances into the otherworldly to maintain an effective story, but Winona’s quest to make it to the alien site is essential. Whether or not these fantastical detours have a grain of truth to them is up to the viewer’s interpretation, but they add to the film’s overarching theme of emotional growth. What the audience believes is true or not says more about the audience themselves than the director’s intentions.
Unidentified Objects Film, LLC
Inherently, the film is about a journey. The simple act of driving across Canada is an odyssey, but it’s deeper than that. Both Peter and Winona agree to this trip for their own hopeful reasons. They’re chasing after abstracts they hope will make sense of their time on Earth. It’s futile and impossible and the only way to spend this life of ours. Whether or not the duo arrives at the alien abduction site in time, or if the aliens themselves are real, is not what matters to the heart of the film. It was never really about those aliens in the first place.
“This planet might just be a worn-out crap-sack spinning through the void, but goddamn I am fond of it,” Suzee (Kerry Flanagan), a friend of Winona, says. Perhaps not the most optimistic view of the world, but one that’s honest. Life on this planet is not perfect. It’s filled with people actively trying to make things worse for marginalized groups, and there probably won’t be a day when everything magically becomes better. Despite that, hope and appreciation will never die. Sometimes, it just takes a road trip to figure that out.
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