The Fourth Kind
Jord 🇵🇸

Review by Jord 🇵🇸 Pro

The Fourth Kind 2009

★★★★★

Watched 18 May 2020

"You can sit here and speculate, but I need to keep hope alive."

A film about believing survivors, believing their trauma, giving them empathy and solidarity.

The distance between something lived and something recreated becomes blurred to the viewer, an intended abstraction (the crackling tapes of recounted experience get lost in the dramatic score of a Hollywood film, and vice versa, slowly becoming indistinguishable). In a film that follows what others are unwilling to believe, it only makes sense that that same test is put to the viewer. Do we believe film? How do we assess the liberties taken with cinema, the performance and perfection afforded to re-enactment? In the end, it might be that abstraction by a fiction forced upon reality can't win against the empathy we feel for others - transcending both. Past our focus on finding the ethereal antagonistic force, a horror staple, we might forget to look more materially at the power balance between survivor and denier - it can't be an accident that two men (one of them a cop) vehemently deny Abigail's trauma, vilifying her, keeping her second-guessing herself. We choose to believe, and in the case of this film the greater that belief, the more horrific the experience; and most notably, the more empathetic we become as viewers. This scared the shit out of me. I would like to ramble a lot more but I'll start getting incomprehensible (if I haven't already), but really give this film a chance!

((((Milla Jovovich saying "that's not my voice" after we hear a recording of the "real" tape audio, distorted and terrifying, is really fucking special.))))

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