Is the truth out there? - The Fourth Kind (2009)

Growing up I was obsessed with aliens and UFO's, but once you've seen one little green man you've seen them all, right? They became less scary than the serial killer you could bump in to in a dark alley, be sitting next to at work or even end up marrying. But excitingly The Fourth Kind trailer promised something else more akin to demonic possession than Mork and Mindy.

Actress Milla Jovovich opens the film by claiming that what we are about to see is all true and based on actual footage and reports by the psychologist Dr Abbey Tyler, the character whom she plays. Thus trying to give the impression of this-film-really-is-based-on-a-true-story-honest-please-believe-me. God, sometimes I wish I wasn't such a cynic. We see cleverly interspersed and split screened scenes of the 'real' footage along side the dramatised footage with clips from an interview with the real Dr Tyler.

Set in the isolated town of Nome in Alaska, three of Dr Tyler's patients all begin to report the same sleeping problems. They wake up at around 3am, feeling very anxious. They look out the window and see an owl staring at them and no matter how hard they try they can't get it to fly away. Very Edgar Allan Poe! When Dr Tyler sees the pattern she decides to hypnotise the first patient Tommy, to find out if he sees anything else. Under hypnosis he describes the owl again but this time says it is not really an owl. He goes on to say that there is someone at his door. Whatever he sees then he cannot talk about as it obviously terrifies him. He later goes home and shoots his family and then himself claiming that would be better than having them see what he has seen.

This gets Dr Tyler some unwanted attention from the police and after she performs another hypnotism which leads to the patient unable to ever walk again she is put under house arrest with her two young children. It's this hypnotism that interested me the most. Drawing on The Exorcist, the patient convulses and levitates off the bed. He speaks in tongues and it seems the aliens are communicating through him, warning the doctor to stop her investigations.

A truth of this film is that actually there have been disappearances in Nome, just like there would be in any town, and the families aren't happy about this film trivialising their losses. Film staff have also been accused of publicising the movie with hoax posts on the Internet, trying to perpetuate the theory that Dr Abbey Tyler really exists. Quite ingenious.

When asked what I thought about the ending I said that I was neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. If they showed the little green men it would've felt like E.T. or something. Leaving it like that may not have been the most exciting cinematic finale ever made, but it was I suppose more realistic, if it is possible for a film about an unseen, unexplained entity to be. Scared people will find any other possible explanation for something they don't understand, to save them from having to process the truth. So if the truth is out there, we probably don't want to know.