This movie made me mad. It is a good premise and cinematically well executed but still deeply unsatisfying. I watched this movie and was left so confused and with so many unanswered questions.
I understand why the opinions on this film are polar extremes. While it is captivating, and even fun to watch at times, the story is confusing and frustrating. The concept is clever and fresh and takes a unique approach by making a film without dialogue. They do beautiful work with the cinematography, and special effects. ($22 million dollar is a tiny budget for a sci-fi feature that shows the aliens as often as this movie does and includes this amount of special effects.) The movie also delved into some really interesting psychological and moral concepts.
However, the resolution, character motivations and inconsistencies in this movie left me scratching my head. The absence of dialogue makes it mandatory to include well plotted out visual details throughout to tell the story clearly. IMO They didn’t provide all I needed to understand everything going on. Telling a complex story without using dialogue is freaking hard man! It leaves the viewer having to decipher a lot. And if you don’t really painstakingly strive to visually include all the needed information in the character actions it can be really confusing.
[BEWARE: THIS NEXT SECTION CONTAINS SPOILERS]
I really didn’t understand the aliens motivation. Did they invade earth because they longed to experience human emotions? I kind of got that from some of the creatures behavior but on the other hand if that’s all they wanted to do why do it in such a hostile fashion. Why did they go through all that effort to hunt this girl down in particular? There seemed to be other non-affected people in town like the other passengers on the bus. The aliens should have been chasing as well. Why was she so important? Why was the behavior or the aliens so inconsistent? Sometimes they seem compassionate and benevolent and at other times they are homicidal. Sometimes they are swift and agile and at other times they are slow, awkward and ridiculously clumsy . It is such a stark contrast at times I thought it was going to end up being some important plot point but it wasn’t. They were just apparently written that way for no clear reason. And normally I’m not this anal and knit picky about details like that but when you don’t give me any dialogue I am watching every move every character makes and scanning every set piece for context clues to help me understand what’s going on. So since I’m being hyper observant every little detail and discrepancy registers.
Also the main character did several things that just made no sense to me. Why are you in a fully furnished and functioning house and the best weapons you can find are a box cutter and pots of boiling water? And she didn’t even decide to look for those until midway through the movie. Why would you not tell anyone about the alien invasion after you kill the first one and why would you go to sleep in the house after an alien just attacked and almost killed you there? Why go back to that same house where you left the dead alien after you have left it? Why breathe and sigh loudly if you are hiding from a killer alien? So many questions…
So overall this is not a horrible movie but it could leave you horribly frustrated after spending an hour and a half watching it only to come to the confusing resolution you get at the end.