The Fourth Kind Movie Review

Predicated on the assumption that the events and archival footage featured in The Fourth Kind are real, writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi has compiled a film that is at the least unsettling if not genuinely disturbing. But as Milla Jovovich reminds us at the outset of this film, what we choose to believe is up to us.

The Fourth Kind is a film about Dr Abigail Tyler, a psychologist finishing up a sleep study in Nome, Alaska in the wake of her husband’s death. The film is cobbled together from footage of Dr Tyler’s subjects, interviews with Dr Tyler herself, and dramatic recreations in which the people involved (with names and occupations changed) are portrayed by actors. After several subjects report similar sleeping disruptions accompanied by consistent hallucinations of a large owl, Dr Tyler begins to investigate the phenomenon. What she finds leads her to believe that Nome is subject to widespread and repeated alien encounters of the fourth kind: abduction.

What really sells this film is the interview footage with Dr Tyler that plays over top of or next to the scene being discussed. Her pallid, slender face and large weary eyes sit behind her defeated monotone voice that almost echoes in her own emptiness. She has the look and demeanor of someone who has traveled to the edge of the world and returned lacking some vital part of herself. All the while, the visual border between the footage of Dr Tyler and the footage of the actors wanders from side to side suggesting an unstable, rather than definitive distinction between the two accounts. 

Assuming that the archive and interview footage that we’re shown is real, Osunsanmi appears to do his due diligence in exploring both sides of the debate. Dr Tyler is shown to be an unreliable narrator, and we’re given an easy psychological trail of breadcrumbs to follow. However, this bait-and-switch technique is perhaps the most powerful tool Osunsanmi uses to sway his viewers towards believing her story. By giving us legitimate reason to doubt, he allows us to feel like skeptics. He places us in an analytical viewpoint and then reminds us, “these are facts, the tape doesn’t lie,” and the tape, as it is shown to us, is too hard to dismiss.

All of this is based on the assumption that the footage we’re shown is real. But where do we get that assumption? Well, from Milla Jovovich at the outset of the film. We have no real reason to believe the filmmakers though. Olatunde Osunsanmi is a filmmaker, not a journalist, and at no point during the lead-up to the film’s release did the word “documentary” escape anyone’s lips.

When you take a step back, the whole thing seems just a bit too put-together. Doesn’t it seem convenient that the alien technology or interference fuzzes up video and audio recordings, leaving a few words or just enough of an image for us to fill in the blanks? Perhaps the eeriness of Dr Tyler’s monotone masks how polished and practiced her lines sound, never once stumbling over her words or pausing for an “um” or an “er.”

It certainly wouldn’t be a surprise if, in a few months, we find that none of it was real. But, for now, and certainly for the two hours you spend in that theater, it’s definitely scarier and a lot more fun to let yourself believe.