The Fourth Kind (2009)

[5]

Milla Jovovich (The Fifth Element) stars as a psychologist in Nome, Alaska, where patients begin telling her about terrifying experiences in the middle of the night — all of which start by seeing an owl in their bedroom window. Jovovich learns the patients are being abducted and controlled by aliens. The police don’t want to hear about it until Jovovich’s own daughter is abducted… oh, and this is a true story.

The Fourth Kind is a pseudo-documentary that weaves ‘actual’ videotape of hypno regression therapy and interviews with the real life woman Jovovich is playing with the dramatized version — often in split-screen, so you can watch both at the same time (curious, isn’t it?) I would have liked the movie considerably more if it were either a straight dramatization or a straight documentary. Either way would allow audiences to ‘fall into’ the story more, and possibly to believe it. Instead, the dramatized sequences work as a movie (true or not), and the documentary bits only serve to snap us out of the story and make us question what we’re watching.

I’m all for a good alien abduction movie. We haven’t had enough of them since Fire in the Sky left its mark on moviegoers in 1993. Jovovich does a decent job with the material, but writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi has a hard time building momentum and his efforts to fortify the story with documentary footage actually undermines his efforts. The result is less of an engrossing movie, and more like a mediocre episode of a cable channel series on the unexplained.

With Elias Koteas and Will Patton.