The Fourth Kind (2009) Review

The Fourth Kind (2009) Review

The Fourth Kind is a peculiar alien abduction film that presents a completely fictional narrative as truth in a pseudo-documentary style, combining dramatic re-enactments with actual documentation. The “real” footage is often played next to the re-enactments in split-screen. I put quotations around real because the story and characters are to be taken as largely factual, even though none of it is based in reality. It even has Milla Jovovich, who plays the main character Dr. Abbey Tyler, appear as herself in the opening moments of the film to explain they have recreated real events, and it’s up to viewers to decide what is true or not. 

There are four kinds of alien encounters. The first is seeing a U.F.O, the second is seeing evidence, such as crop circles, the third is contact (depicted in numerous films, perhaps most-famously in Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and the fourth, as you may have already guessed, is abduction. In the remote locale of Nome, Alaska, numerous people have disappeared over the years, and Dr. Tyler is a psychologist who begins to notice some commonalities among her patients, namely a mysterious owl that appears to them at night. Dr. Tyler’s husband was murdered, though no killer was ever convicted, and as she continues to put patients under hypnosis and question them, she starts to unravel the mystery of what’s been going on in Nome. 

It’s an interesting idea of presenting an alien abduction in such a realistic way, because it isn’t a purely found-footage film, yet manages to create the same kind of feeling and illusion of reality using similar tricks, like doctored footage, strange audio recordings, one-on-one interviews, and surveillance footage. Much of the dramatized scenes are filmed in handheld, which gets a little annoying at times, but is far better than the shaky cam typically used for found footage. It’s a pretty even split, as far as dramatized footage versus “real” footage, but the quality is decidedly uneven, in many regards. 

The Fourth Kind is slow to start, and the repeated use of real and dramatized scenes playing side-by-side, as if to show how accurate the recreations were, gets tedious as it becomes clearer none of it is real. I’m a fan of Milla Jovovich, but even as a fan of her work, I have to admit this is not one of her better performances. She fumbles some of the dialogue and displays an inconsistent level of emotion, but even having said that, she still does a decent job carrying the movie. The acting across the board isn’t great, but the “real” footage comes off as pretty authentic most of the time, with a few exceptions where cheap effects are used. Even though it kind of feels like the movie is trying to trick viewers, I can’t deny how creepy some of the visuals are, and how unsettling things get toward the end. 

It’s not a spoiler so much as a word of warning to recommend watching The Fourth Kind knowing this is a low budget, minimalist alien abduction film that doesn’t even depict any aliens on-screen, but rather evokes the sci-fi concept using a number of techniques, some of which prove more effective than others. It isn’t exceptional, but is still undeniably eerie.