- Directed by Brian Duffield
- Written by Brian Duffield
- Stars Kaitlyn Dever, Elizabeth Kaluev, Zack Duhame, Lauren L. Murray
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 33 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpxQ8xklfr8
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This was some very impressive acting from Katilyn Dever, who basically has no dialogue at all in the movie. In fact, the movie barely has any spoken words. The action and effects are all good, and it moves well. It’s one that leaves you thinking about it after it’s done.
Synopsis
Brynn is obviously very nervous about something. She then goes downstairs and sews something, which she puts into a package to mail. On the way out, she finds a circle of dead grass in the yard, so she turns on the sprinkler. She waves at a neighbor, who ignores her entirely. She then drives to town and puts her packages in the mailbox. On the way back, she stops at her mother’s grave. Walking to her car, she hides from the police chief, who is kissing his wife. She gets a new dollhouse in the mail, which brightens her day. She then writes a letter to Maude, the police chief’s daughter. Eventually, she goes to bed.
Late that night, the lights come on by themselves. Brynn wakes up and hears something growling and moving around downstairs. It laughs and comes up the stairs toward her room. It opens the door and comes in, and we get to see it. It’s a tall, thin alien. Brynn hides under the bed as it explores her room. It eventually climbs out the window.
Things in the house start moving all by themselves, which freaks out Brynn. She runs into an alien in the kitchen, and it sees her as well. She defends herself, and she stabs the thing in the head, apparently killing it.
In the morning, Brynn wakes up, and the alien is still there on the floor. She reluctantly dials 911, but the phone doesn’t work. Not only that, but all the power is off. She limps out to the car, but that’s dead as well. She rides her bicycle to town but finds the mail truck turned over. She goes to the neighbor’s house, and she sees one of those “crop circles” on their lawn, too.
She walks to town, where there are lots of people. She finds Chief Collins at the police station, and his wife spits on her. The chief ignores her. She’s clearly not going to get any help from the police. She gets on the bus, and we see many of those circles on her ride home. The mailman is on the bus, and it appears that he’s possessed or something.
She takes the shortcut through the cemetery and stops at Maude Collins’s grave. She died eleven years ago, at age 12. Suddenly, very strange storm clouds appear over the whole town as Brynn runs home. She watches several of her neighbors behaving strangely as the storm approaches; they all seem to have creatures in their throats.
Brynn finally makes it back home on foot, and the dead alien is still there… but there’s now a blood trail leading from the body outside. She gathers up all the knives she can find and starts barricading her house. There’s a bright light outside, and the dead alien floats out the door.
Another alien comes inside, and they soon end up face to face. She runs upstairs, where a shorter version of the alien attacks her, but this one, she’s able to fight off. This little one is really persistent, and she eventually manages to kill it as well.
She goes outside and sees one of the creatures with big spider-like legs, but before she can get away, she’s grabbed by the mailman. He drags her to a spaceship, but things go wrong for the mailman. She then traps the big spider alien in her exploding car, killing it, too.
The aliens outside finally catch Brynn in their tractor beam and bang her around a bit. While she’s immobilized, one of them closes in and examines her. It then coughs up a hairball– no, it’s a little parasitic thing with tentacles, like an anemone. She opens her mouth, and it goes inside…
Brynn wakes up in the morning, screaming. Was any of that real? Her room is neat and undamaged, so probably not. All her stuff downstairs is fine as well. Someone comes inside the house, and it’s– Maude, who’s been dead a long time. Brynn apologizes to Maude for her part in Maude’s death, whatever that was. Brynn then reaches down her throat and rips out the parasite, which is causing her to hallucinate. Another spaceship appears to send the parasite a new body. We cut away to see a bunch of flying saucers up there…
Possessed-Maude-reproduction then appears again, and Brynn stabs her. The ship reappears and beams Brynn up, where the aliens surround her in curiosity. One reaches over and touches her forehead, and then Brynn is back at home with her own mother and a younger version of herself. She gets a re-enactment of what happened when Maude died. Brynn did, in fact, basically murder Maude in a rash moment of a child losing her temper. The aliens, of course, are watching the whole thing play out.
The aliens argue about what to do next, and something big in the ship lights up that they seem to defer to, and she is back down on Earth.
She wakes up, laughs, and goes back to her house. She cleans herself up and goes for a bike ride. She hangs up more decorations, and everything goes back to normal for her. Now, when she waves at the alien-possessed neighbors, they wave back. She has won the aliens’ respect. Then she goes to a big, elaborate dance with the man who ignored her earlier and joyfully dances. In the background, we see a full-scale invasion outside of her perfect diorama.
Commentary
I went into this one completely blind. In the first scene, she sees the little, tiny circle in the grass, and I laugh, “It’s a little crop circle.” I thought I was joking, but no, that was exactly it.
Stephen King wrote in a tweet that he compared this to the old Twilight Zone episode, “The Invaders.” He hit it dead on with that comparison. A lone woman who can’t communicate does battle with aliens on her own. The twist from the TV episode isn’t here, but the basic plot is the same.
I have questions. Were the bony, long-limbed aliens the baddies, or were they just pawns/victims of the anemone mind-control bugs? Were the “bugs” the minds behind the invasion, or were they a reproductive thing like the chest-burster in “Alien”? The ending: was that all in her mind, or did the aliens change everything on Earth to please her?
The creature design is really good here, and we get to see a lot of them. Some of the individuals vary in height and the length of their limbs. They’re completely CGI, but they’re very well done. There’s almost no dialogue, and no one really gets to do any acting except for Kaitlyn Dever, as Brynn, but she does really well with it.
Excellent!