Kiefer Storrer’s review published on Letterboxd:
Found footage films/mockumentaries are one of my favorite genres. S/O (and RIP) to my Junior year Media Production 2 super amateur super low budget flick, Blair Witch Project X, which is lost forever. Anyway, I also love aliens. The 4th Kind innovates on the genre with a spoken word opening by the lead, as the lead, explaining that her and various professional actors are portraying a dramatization of very real events, and the telling of these events are supplemented with archival interview, documentary, and audio footage.
So I genuinely thought this shit was real the first time that I saw it. The producers of the film also basically had ARG-like websites and bios for the documentarians. I love that commitment.
The other thing that is very cool is that the director is the child of African immigrant parents, and there is some really cool connections between African culture and Sumeria, and the aliens writ large. As I was watching the film, there are some vaguely hard to understand messages in a foreign language, and the characters are like “well it’s not Latin or Greek, who knows what it could be?” And I had a thought about how so much horror is rooted (often very coolly) in those Western languages, and seeing a language origin from what the west would call the Middle East is pretty neat.
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