The Fourth Kind (2009)
Studio: Universal Pictures
Directed By: Olatunde Osunsanmi
Starring: Milla Jovovich, Will Patton, Elias Koteas
Reviewed by: Sam Hawken

It’s been ten years since The Blair Witch Project became the little movie that could, and scared up millions on a budget of a scant few thousand. Since that time there have been a few attempts to do the cinéma vérité thing in the same way with varying levels of success. Cloverfield pulled it off. George Romero’s Diary of the Dead did not. In the end it evens out, I suppose.

Of course now the big, new, exciting entry in this subgenre is Paranormal Activity and it, like Blair Witch before it, has managed to rake in millions on the back of positive word-of-mouth and a creepy, minimalist execution. But this review isn’t about Paranormal Activity. It’s about the other movie that borrows some Blair Witch techniques in an attempt to wrest a scare or two out of the audience. This movie is called The Fourth Kind.

It’s actually a real shame The Fourth Kind came out when it did because its successes as a picture are going to be crushed under the feet of Paranormal Activity. They are going to be seen as two sides of the same coin when in actuality they don’t have very much in common at all. And worse yet, The Fourth Kind is going to be considered less effective in the scare department when, truth be told, it manages to out-fright its littler cousin.

Unlike Paranormal Activity, which puts on the veneer of reality the way Blair Witch did, The Fourth Kind comes right out at the beginning of the film and says, “This is true.” Milla Jovovich addresses the camera directly and claims that everything the audience is about to see is taken directly from video or audio recordings made of the actual events or from archival records. It’s a ballsy move that even Paranormal Activity didn’t dare make.

Not to spoil anything for you (the trailers already have), but The Fourth Kind is about alien abduction. Make all the jokes you want about anal probes at the outset because the movie treats the subject with dead seriousness. Milla Jovovich takes on the role of Dr. Abigail Tyler, a psychologist in Nome, Alaska whose practice reveals disturbing parallels between the nighttime experiences of her patients. The patients say their sleep is disturbed in the early morning hours and they all report seeing a white owl at their windows or even in their rooms.

The owl is a screen memory for something deeply suppressed, and I suspect even if the movie’s advertising hadn’t given away the root cause of all the trouble it wouldn’t be too difficult for an audience raised on The X-Files to figure things out. This doesn’t kill the tension, though. After all, we knew going into Paranormal Activity that it was about a haunting.

Unlike those other movies, The Fourth Kind combines the “found footage” technique with straightforward moviemaking. Scenes are played out in split screen many times during the picture, showing us the dramatization and the “actual” event it depicts. We see the “real” Dr. Tyler repeatedly — almost too much, actually — and sometimes her lines read directly into Milla Jovovich’s lines and vice versa.

It’s an odd way to tell a story, but it works. Most of us have watched some kind of reality television offering or another so we’re used to the blending of fact, fiction, drama and truth. When The Fourth Kind starts flashing little telltales on the screen informing us that the audio from a tape is real or that the footage taken from a deputy sheriff’s car-cam is unaltered from the original source, our mind processes it in a certain way as being truthful.

Writer/director Olatunde Osunsanmi even appears onscreen as himself, interviewing the ostensibly real Dr. Tyler off and on through the running time of the picture. It’s interesting to see the way the different threads of Osunsanmi’s narrative twisted around and interact with each other. The Fourth Kind is admittedly a kind of weird movie not just in the way it’s made but in the story it tells.

Its story logic can also be a little sketchy, and more than once I started to thinking critically of the plot while it was still going on, which isn’t good. It may be that Osunsanmi put so much energy into playing mind games with the audience that he forgot some simple rules of storytelling.

But is it scary? I’m not sure if that’s a fair thing to ask from the movie. Of course, I heard that Paranormal Activity was going to scare the pants off me and I was barely kept awake by the slowest of slow-burn storytelling. I’m not even sure if The Fourth Kind even qualifies as a horror movie, despite the fact that I’m reviewing it for a horror site.

There are jumps to be had in The Fourth Kind if that’s your thing, and even I recoiled from one sudden burst of frightening commotion onscreen so that’s saying something. For the most part, though, The Fourth Kind is more disturbing and thought-provoking than outright scary, and so long as you’re not expecting the second coming of The Exorcist you won’t be disappointed.

Beyond the scare factor, the inevitable question that people are going to ask is: what’s real in The Fourth Kind? It tries very hard to blur that line between science and science fiction, and sometimes it’s possible to forget yourself and think, “Wow, that’s [interesting/frightening/etc.],” without considering the veracity of it. In that this is the filmmakers’ entire goal, I say they succeeded.

But, no, I don’t think The Fourth Kind is real. Though Dr. Tyler and others are credited by their “real” names in the closing reel as having played themselves, I don’t buy that what I saw was anything other than sometimes clever fiction that plays off alien-abduction lore and the accumulated effect of many different UFO-related television shows and movies. That isn’t the same thing as saying it’s BAD — in fact, it’s kind of good — but in the end it didn’t sell me on its version of reality. I almost wish it had.

Ed. Note: In case you were wondering, The Fourth Kind is not, in fact, real. None of the “real” footage is legitimate, and a quick Google search will turn up no results on abductions, disappearances, or even an Abigail Tyler in Nome, Alaska. This movie could’ve succeeded in fooling people if we didn’t live in the internet age, or if the studio put some money into serious marketing. Even The Blair Witch had websites with faux news information. And that was 10 years ago. See our write up “The Fourth Kind: A Case of More Hollywood Hype?” for more info.