Since Jack Finney’s “The Body Snatchers” was first published 70 years ago, screen adaptations — official and unofficial alike — have taken place in small-town USA, Me Decade San Francisco, a military base, high school and so forth. All had a gist in common: humanity being infiltrated and co-opted by a shape-shifting invasive force from outer space. Loosely playing on that theme, Zach Clark’s “The Becomers” adds a new wrinkle, in that this time the body-hopping entities don’t necessarily intend conquest. They just want to co-exist, peacefully. But it turns out they may have chosen the wrong planet and/or species, because they discover today’s mankind is perhaps too messed up to be worth the trouble.
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That’s a good premise for the kind of sly, deadpan absurdism Clark aims for here. But despite its fantastical hook, this episodic narrative lands short of the curiously winsome black comedy quirkiness its writer-director achieved with prior features “Little Sister” and “White Reindeer.” A sort of shaggy dog story whose appeal wanes as one gradually realizes it’s unlikely to go anywhere in particular, “The Becomers” is equally mild as sci-fi, spoof and sociopolitical satire. It’s off-kilter enough to catch one’s attention, but in the end too underdeveloped to strongly reward it.
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Russell Mael of the long-running cult band Sparks commences things with voiceover narration as our nameless, genderless protagonist, relating a backstory — thoughout this film’s present-tense progress — of life on a dying home planet. Eventually they and their lover were selected for evacuation, traveling through the cosmos in separate travel pods.
That results in the narrator landing in a forested area of Illinois, where the crashed spacecraft’s pink smoke attracts a hunter (Conrad Dean), to his misfortune. He becomes the first human body occupied by said alien, staggering zombie-like to a stopped car where a woman in distress (Isabel Alamin’s Francesca) is about to give birth — a considerable inconvenience for all parties concerned. Discovering to her alarm that this hopeful rescuer has glowing aquamarine eyes, she becomes Vessel No. 2.
Learning how to pass as human, “Francesca” checks into a Motel 6, absorbing language and culture via the room’s TV — even if the channel she watches seems to be a parodied Fox News. That process goes smoothly enough until it becomes apparent that police are searching for “her” (the discarded newborn has been found), and front desk clerk Gene (Frank V. Ross) grows a little too curious about this mysterious lone guest. Our hero/ine must go on the lam again, soliciting a ride from a suburban housewife (Molly Plunk) whose body and home are then usurped.
This turns out to be a poor choice, because it emerges after a fashion that Carol and husband Gordon (Mike Lopez) aren’t just charitably inclined evangelical Christians. They’re also fanatical conspiracy theorists in a QAnon mode who are already neck-deep in a criminal plot they think will combat a “devil-worshipping elite.” That greatly complicates our narrator’s reunion with “my lover,” a neon-pink-eyed changeling who turns up in one human guise (a bus driver played by Jacquelyn Haas), and then switches to another. Trying to maintain a low profile, the duo instead find themselves embroiled in intrigue involving the Governor (Keith Kelly), FBI and national media.
There is real potential in the notion of space creatures seeking asylum, only to find themselves swept into the more cultish extremes of our bizarre political moment, which of course make no sense to them. But “The Becomers” never quite whips itself up to a sufficient level of wackiness or critique to fully seize that opportunity. Its closest prior screen corollary is less a “Body Snatchers” variation than John Sayles’ “Brother From Another Planet,” but without that film’s warmth (or a central performance as appealing as Joe Morton’s) to ballast the tepidly quirky humor. The voiceover text Mael recites has a droll mix of banality and surrealism that nothing actually depicted here comes close enough to amplifying.
The exquisite-corpse nature of the identity-swapping premise keeps Clark’s film diverting, though in the end, it leaves too slight an impression for such a bold conceit. There’s not enough felt emotion here to make the extraterrestrial fugitive lovers’ plight seem touching, as it’s ultimately intended, and the social commentary elements promise more than they deliver. Competently acted and crafted, “The Becomers” is a clever idea that feels like it’s still just being sketched out when it comes to a close.
Dark Star Pictures opened the Chicago-shot indie at NYC’s Cinema Village this weekend, with bookings in other cities to follow, and an On Demand launch Sept. 24.
