A close encounter of the emotionally charged kind, British writer-director Michael Pearce’s glossy sci-fi chase thriller stars Riz Ahmed as a military veteran battling his own demons as well as extra-terrestrial foes. Building on the promise of his BAFTA-winning 2017 debut feature Beast, Pearce again uses slow-burn suspense, menacing ambiguity and simmering family tensions here, but this time he is working on a grander scale with the majestic alien landscapes of America’s desert southwest as backdrop. Powered by strong performances, Encounter is a superior genre exercise in a finely crafted, generally pleasing package. World premiered in Telluride ahead of its Toronto launch this week, with a London Film Festival slot to follow next month, this Amazon-backed UK/US co-production is set for both theatrical and streaming release in December.
With his signature wired intensity, Ahmed is natural star casting as Malik Khan, a decorated former US Marine who has left the military to pursue a new undercover mission: saving mankind from stealth invasion by microscopic alien mind-control parasites that arrive on Earth on flaming meteors and spread to humans via bloodsucking bugs. Malik may be a war hero, but he has also has a dark and violent past. After two years estranged from his ex-wife Piya (Janina Gavankar) and young sons, Jay (Lucian-River Chauhan) and Bobby (Aditya Geddada), he steals into the family home one night, sneaking the boys away for an epic journey across the dusty badlands of California and Nevada. “This ain’t a road trip,” he tells them ominously, “it’s a rescue mission.”
Legally speaking, it is also a kidnapping. Heavily armed lawmen soon mobilise a massive manhunt, fearing Malik fits the classic pattern of a potential “family annihilator”. But in his fevered brain, the fugitive dad is saving his boys from invisible alien attack, even if it leads him into violent confrontation with suspicious state troopers, shotgun-blasting right-wing militia men and other parasite-infected enemies. Pearce spices these episodic clashes with gentle humour and a sprinkle of timely socio-political subtext, including fleeting nods to Trump-ian Proud Boy types and Covid-era anti-vaccine cranks, although the parallels are mostly too opaque and vague to gain much satirical traction.
In previous decades, and in less subtle hands, Encounter could have been a fairly generic vehicle for an action star like Bruce Willis, Nicolas Cage or Mel Gibson. The screenplay, by Pearce and Joe Barton, certainly contains plenty of corny lines and macho gunplay. But it also features unexpected plot swerves, great performances and superlative visuals. On the technical side, it reunites Pearce with several key Beast veterans, including editor Maya Maffioli and cinematographer Benjamin Kracun, who went on to shoot Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman (2020). Kracus dresses Encounter in alluringly saturated hues, lending a radiant golden glow to the rugged desert vistas, with striking use of meticulously composed overhead shots and tilting camera angles.
But the glue that holds this disjointed, blandly titled road movie together is the warm, natural chemistry between its core cast. While Ahmed’s edgy charisma and – let’s be frank – ripped beauty are always compelling to witness, his young co-stars almost act him off screen. Chauhan does most of the emotional heavy lifting as a sensitive pre-teen struggling with the bitterweet rites-of-passage burden of seeing his father’s deep flaws, but Geddada is the true scene-stealer with his toothy, wonky, dishevelled charm. Crucially, these kids seem like authentically rough-edged innocents, cute but not Hollywood-cute. Octavia Spencer also brings powerful presence to the film’s second half, arguably typecast but still hugely endearing in another big-hearted earth-mother role.
Encounter is front-loaded with bravura CG visual effects on both a cosmic and microscopic level, from dazzling wide shots of meteors plunging through the stratosphere to nightmarish plagues of insects and meticulously creepy close-ups of parasitic bugs swimming through watery human eyeballs. By filtering the film’s POV through Khan’s paranoid anxieties, as well as through the impressionable hero-worship gaze of his young sons, Pearce keeps viewers in a state of teasingly open-ended tension about how much of this queasy body-horror is real and how much is the product of unbalanced, overheated imagination.
Without getting into spoilers, Encounter abandons this fruitful ambiguity in its latter stages and settles into more conventional action mode, with pulse-racing car chases, tense desert showdowns and tear-jerking exchanges between father and son. Pearce may wrong-foot audience expectations with this shift in narrative register, but he also risks succumbing to sentimental cliché. Not a wholly satisfying finale, but there is still plenty to enjoy in this sure-footed and stylish twist on sci-fi thriller ingredients.
Director: Michael Pearce
Screenplay: Joe Barton, Michael Pearce
Cast: Riz Ahmed, Lucian-River Chauhan, Aditya Geddada, Octavia Spencer, Rory Cochrane, Janina Gavankar, Misha Collins, Shane McRae, Antonio Jaramillo, Keith Szarabajka
Producers: Derrin Schlesinger, Piers Vellacott, Dimitri Doganis
Cinematography: Benjamin Kracun
Editing: Maya Maffioli
Production designer: Tim Grimes
Costume designer: Emma Potter
Music: Jed Kurzel
Production companies: Amazon Studios (US), Film4 (UK), Raw (UK)
Venue: Toronto International Film Festival (Special Presentations)
In English
98 minutes
