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Ghostface Milla | In The Fourth Kind, Milla Jovovich confronts a much less benign form of alien than she did in The Fifth Element.

The Fourth Kind

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THE FOURTH KIND
Directed by Olatunde Osunsanmi. Starring Milla Jovovich, Elias Koteas, Will Patton. Opens Fri, Nov 6.
***1/2

The Fourth Kind doesn’t appear to have much going for it. It’s an alien-abduction thriller from a director, Olatunde Osunsanmi, whose only other significant film credit is the script for the forthcoming Smokin’ Aces 2: Assassins’ Ball. It stars Milla Jovovich, who’s spent the last decade doing Resident Evil sequels. (She’s cast here as a hard-working Alaskan psychologist and single mother — already the picture has credibility problems.) And it works so hard assuring you that the story you’re about to see is 100 per cent true that you have to assume the whole thing is a hoax.

In fact, Osunsanmi goes so far as to film several scenes in split-screen, with actors like Jovovich, Elias Koteas, and Will Patton on side and what’s purported to be actual videotape footage of real-life psychologist Dr. Abigail Tyler hypnotizing her patients on the other. (Sometimes he gets really fancy and splits the screen into four, six, even eight windows, like on 24.) It’s sometimes hard to tell what point Osunsanmi is trying to do in these scenes, except to make sure we note that his actors are saying their lines at exactly the same speed that the “real” people are.

And yet I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find The Fourth Kind to be genuinely chilling — even more so than Paranormal Activity, which makes a similar attempt to blur the line between horror and documentary, albeit with a lot less flash and a lot less money. And like Paranormal Activity, The Fourth Kind generates most of its scares by keeping the monsters offscreen. Here’s the set-up: Jovovich is trying to figure out why so many of her patients (who all live in Nome, Alaska) are suffering from sleeplessness and having the same disquieting nighttime vision of a white owl looking at them in the dark. They know it wasn’t “really” an owl, but that’s all they can remember. She tries to unblock their memory by putting them under hypnosis — but each time she does so, the patient freaks out, unable to articulate the horrible truth they’ve just seen. They die or kill themselves soon after.

So really, The Fourth Kind isn’t about aliens so much as it is the fear of ... well, fear. The hypnosis sequences are like that terrifying monologue from David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive — the one where the guy describes a nightmare he keeps having about a man in the alley behind Winkie’s Diner, with a horrible face that he hopes he “never sees outside of a dream.” There are so many layers of fear going on in these scenes that they’re almost unendurable: the slow, slow buildup of dread as the characters tell a story whose conclusion even they don’t know; there’s the fear of some all-powerful other that can reach into our world at any moment and snatch us away; and there’s also the profoundly creepy thought that those creatures have violated us already, maybe while we were asleep, and that we simply can’t remember it.

Or maybe this is just the kind of notion that really happens to push my buttons. Maybe other moviegoers will roll their eyes at the self-serious tone, or laugh at the snippets of Osunsanmi’s interview with the “real” Dr. Tyler (a shell-shocked woman who looks distractingly like Jill Talley from Mr. Show). All I know is, hoax or not, I sat there in the movie theatre, dreading the moment when the movie would be over and I’d have to walk out into the parking lot, in the dark, and hopefully find my car before the aliens grabbed me.