Joe’s review published on Letterboxd:
The owls are not what they seem...
I'm not much of a found footage fiend but this has to be one of the most fascinating examples of the form I've ever watched, as committed to the illusion that what we're seeing is real as anything since The Blair Witch Project, probably more so with tricks like having Milla Jovovich and director Olatunde Osunsanmi address the audience directly and sneaking the name of fictional character "Dr. Abigail Tyler," depicted both in purported reenactments by Jovovich and in ALSO purported archival footage by actress Charlotte Milchard into the closing credits. I was stumped on how they managed that one but apparently Milchard is credited as "Nome resident" rather than revealing the character as being fictional. Very sneaky, I like it!
The whole fictional archival footage gimmick lets this play some head-spinning games with fiction vs reality, all playing on the audience's knowledge of how "real" footage looks and how movies can enact and fictionalize stories that are nevertheless true. There's one scene where Jovovich and Elias Koteas's characters are listening to a tape recording that she is supposed to have made and on which an alien voice can also be heard. "That's not my voice," says Jovovich, but since the tape they and we in the audience are hearing is purportedly (I keep having to use "purported" in talking about this movie!) the "actual" audio recording the doctor's regular voice doesn't match Jovovich's either. So it would be easy to interpret the scene not as "Dr. Tyler" reacting to the alien voice on the tape but as a fictional character reacting to the voice of her real-life counterpart, a schism in reality that would be just as unnerving as any alien abduction.
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