Earthling Rating:
Director: Clay Liford
Showtimes: Saturday 8th, 6:30 pm at the USB Student Center; Sunday 9th, 4:30 pm at The Charles Theater
Starring:Rebecca Spence, Peter Greene, Amelia Turner, William Katt, Matt Socia, Savanna Sears, Jennifer Sipes, Chris Doubek
AP Rating:
The opening shots of Clay Liford’s Earthling hold a mysterious, tantalizing splendor; a foreboding, spiked meteor hurtles through space like an intergalactic seed pod, comes in contact with a space station just outside of our planet’s atmosphere.
These initial scenes aboard the American space station have a dingy, lived-in feel and they instantly evoke Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and set the tone for the rest of the pic. Traditionalist sci-fi fans have been warned; this isn’t a glossy pulp monster tale, but a solemn meditation on human existence and relationship.
After that, Liford explores a winding, contrived mystery that takes the kind of genre elements geeks drool over—otherworldly visitors, slimy parasites, genetic mutation—and folds them into a drama that has its eyes wide open when it comes to observing the rhythm of life on our little blue orb.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I found the film slight and unsteady the first time through, balking at the austere narrative that Liford provides and frustrated by the lack of detail in the sci-fi set-up. Instead of a fully formed story, what we get is a series of beautiful images, intimate human moments and more than an earful of arcane, vague dialogue detailing the truth behind the mysterious space object and the strangers on Earth who are affected by its arrival.
A second viewing reveals not only a hidden layer of sensitivity and thoughtfulness, but also unearths Liford’s real agenda, which extends beyond the desire to drop a fast-food thrill ride in the audience’s lap. Instead, like all good science fiction, Earthling takes its collection of ideas and events and turns them inward, pointing them like a hi-tech ray-gun, right back at us. Questions of personal identity, familial connection and concepts of universal morality rise to the surface, and when they do, Earthling is transformed from a wobbly, unsuccessful thriller into a compelling, authentic tone poem, worthy of its SF fore-bearers.
Pulling together a well-cast group of actors, Liford proves more interested in how his characters feel than the ultimate logic of the secrets they are trying to uncover. Typically in these films, outer-space invaders have one of two agendas; conquer/eat/enslave or communicate/collaborate. Liford, drawing on the protagonists of Nic Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth and John Sayles’ Brother From Another Planet, finds a third possibility, and what follows has twice the emotional impact of your average episode of V or all of Independence Day.
Fans of David Cronenberg and his obsession with body horror will appreciate that not all of this is stationary nature photography or stage-play conversational scenes. Images of something small and bloody making its way through the muddy earth or a young girl pulling back her hair to reveal the growths on her scalp recall that Canadian auteur of the biologically grotesque, and I think he would be more than a bit amused by what Earthling has to offer.
Ultimately, even after a second watch, Earthling is still a little too obscure for its own good, and the ideas it introduces are never full delivered on. Personally, I wanted to know more about the method and nature of the mysterious sphere, and where it was going.
Still, when the film focuses its energies on exploring the inner feelings and suspicions of its grounded extraterrestrials, it achieves the intrinsic goal of the genre; it places all of our finite longings and petty concerns into the context of a larger universe, and then argues for their merit. That’s not a slight job for a film featuring alien space slugs.
Get information on buying tickets for Earthling’s Baltimore premeire at the Maryland Film Festival HERE.
