A real slow burner this one so stick with it as after 65 minutes of torturous fasting the ending is 'everything you can eat' in 20. Josh and Isabel Harris have lost their infant daughter by some sort of mysterious disappearance/alien abduction which is never really explained save some momentary back story jump-cuts to imply the latter.
As to how at least 6 inquisitive children and one supervising adult simply evaporate into thin air from within a nursery school library without so much as a protesting shush!, in the time taken for Mrs Harris to visit the rest room is anyone's guess. The other yawning chasm in the plot is the lack of any Police presence at the house after the same Mrs Harris viciously attacks her husband's boss with a (very large) knife stabbing him repeatedly (but not fatally, we learn almost by way of a casual shrugging rejoinder in the aftermath) As the grieving couple, the performances of both Juanita Ringeling and Cristobal Tappia Montt are portentously overwrought to the point of 'method' slapstick and although I wouldn't dare pretend I know what it feels like to lose a child, it's clear the actors don't have the first clue either. The ending is extremely violent and on the cusp of gratuitously gory but as to why an alien species would resort to Grand Guignol slayings of these pesky humanoids in their midst is a question the Director needs to reverse engineer for his promised sequel. The art-house cinematography reminded me in places of Lars von Trier's obliquely hallucinatory Antichrist which is considerably more pretentious and also centered around a couple mourning a lost child. The radio transmissions that Josh Harris and his assistant (Kyle Davis) have identified as being of extraterrestrial origin makes for an intriguing story but apart from the aforementioned transparent artifice of setting up the inevitable sequel, no attempt is made to explain the events that are depicted. Intelligent movies don't need to continually remind us of the fact and Phillips has yet to learn that if you take the sex out of horror you're left with just forensics.
As to how at least 6 inquisitive children and one supervising adult simply evaporate into thin air from within a nursery school library without so much as a protesting shush!, in the time taken for Mrs Harris to visit the rest room is anyone's guess. The other yawning chasm in the plot is the lack of any Police presence at the house after the same Mrs Harris viciously attacks her husband's boss with a (very large) knife stabbing him repeatedly (but not fatally, we learn almost by way of a casual shrugging rejoinder in the aftermath) As the grieving couple, the performances of both Juanita Ringeling and Cristobal Tappia Montt are portentously overwrought to the point of 'method' slapstick and although I wouldn't dare pretend I know what it feels like to lose a child, it's clear the actors don't have the first clue either. The ending is extremely violent and on the cusp of gratuitously gory but as to why an alien species would resort to Grand Guignol slayings of these pesky humanoids in their midst is a question the Director needs to reverse engineer for his promised sequel. The art-house cinematography reminded me in places of Lars von Trier's obliquely hallucinatory Antichrist which is considerably more pretentious and also centered around a couple mourning a lost child. The radio transmissions that Josh Harris and his assistant (Kyle Davis) have identified as being of extraterrestrial origin makes for an intriguing story but apart from the aforementioned transparent artifice of setting up the inevitable sequel, no attempt is made to explain the events that are depicted. Intelligent movies don't need to continually remind us of the fact and Phillips has yet to learn that if you take the sex out of horror you're left with just forensics.