As we continue our exploration of modern classics from the last few years, we would be remiss if we ignored Nathan Hill and Simon Oliver's Alien Love (2024), an Australian science fiction film about an astronaut and his wife.
Some of your universe's critics fail to understand the visionary quality of Alien Love. For example, reviewer axel335 writes, "This movies is awful. It's awful in any way a movie can be awful. There are currently no words in the English language to really describe how awful this movie is." Reviewer BandSAboutMovies writes, "Alien Love is kind of confounding." And reviewer Film Blitz, comparing Alien Love to similar movies, writes, "This just can’t compete."
Read on for the truth, if not about alien visitations, about Alien Love...
The film begins with a montage of scenes from a marriage and a woman's voiceover: "From the moment I met Ryan, I fell madly in love with him. It was a true case of love at first sight. I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him."
The film proper begins as the woman from the montage, Sadie, watches footage of a space shuttle launch on her MacBook Air, whose keyboard is labeled with color codes that video editors like to use. The shuttle launches into the sky, and the filmmakers intercut shots of Sadie with shots of her husband Ryan smiling (some might say goofily) in his astronaut helmet.
Later, Sadie, who lives in Australia but plans to move to the United States soon, goes to the facility where her grandmother lives. Before she sees her grandmother, she runs into a nurse in the hallway. "I hear hubby's finally in orbit," the nurse tells Sadie.
Sadie sits down at her grandmother's bedside and of course they converse about Sadie's astronaut husband. "Ryan's a real man," Sadie says. "He's exactly what I need right now. It's so good to be married."
Sadie's grandmother (who appears to be about 10 years older than Sadie at the most) starts coughing (never a good sign in a film).
After another conversation with another woman about her astronaut husband (who is, if I haven't been clear enough, an astronaut), Sadie is visited at her home by a man-bunned NASA colonel. "Seems we had a complication in space," he tells her matter-of-factly. "We lost contact with Ryan for about 60 seconds."
"That's impossible," Sadie says skeptically. "You're telling me that even NASA can't keep up with technology now?"
Colonel Smith assures Sadie that Ryan is fine and he is currently returning to Earth. This prompts a black-and-white flashback as Sadie remembers kissing her husband in a park beneath a tree. Ryan asks her in his thick Australian accent, "Honey, am I a gritty man to want two dreams in life?"
"I don't think so. Depends on what they are, I guess. What are they?"
"Well, dream number one: you."
"You got me, baby," Sadie laughs.
"Dream number two: to fly." He takes out a keychain with a big NASA logo on it.
Sadie takes the keychain and buries it under the tree. "For good luck," she says.
In the present, Ryan returns to Earth and is immediately helicoptered to Sadie. They kiss, but Ryan says nothing. She takes him home, where she has put a small banner over the TV that says "WELCOME HOME! WELCOME HOME!"
Sadie quickly notices her husband acting strangely, primarily because he sniffs his toast before eating it. Later, they go to a restaurant to eat. Ryan is wearing a NASA t-shirt and a Kennedy Space Center baseball cap, so a woman comes to their table and blurts out, "Excuse me, are you an astronaut? Can I have your autograph?"
Later, Sadie and Ryan have sex under a purple light while New Age music plays. When she wakes up, he is gone, but he left a Post-It note on the mirror saying he went for a run.
Sadie calls her friend Abbey to voice her suspicions. "He won't tell me anything about what happened in space," she says. "Like, I'm his wife. I have a right to know."
"Maybe the aliens got to him," her friend says jokingly.
"Ha ha, very funny. But his diet's way off and he's barely eating."
Abbey tells her to watch some alien documentary DVDs and not to worry about Ryan.
At the same time, Ryan jogs to a meeting of a group called Aliens Anonymous. The meeting, coincidentally, starts as soon as Ryan arrives. The group share stories about alien encounters. Wyatt, a bespectacled young man, tells a story about visiting Papua, New Guinea and seeing a flying saucer above the village. Another group member, Charlie, says that he had a relative who worked at Area 51 and became a drunkard. Oddly, Ryan doesn't get a chance to tell a story. Instead, the meeting ends and he leaves the building, then awkwardly attempts to steal a woman's car.
Meanwhile, Sadie returns to her grandmother's hospital room, where her grandmother wants to hear what is going on in Sadie's life. "Honey, darling, trust me, I'm as bored as batshit in here, so any news would be better than staring at these four walls."
When Sadie says Ryan lost some time in space, her grandmother says, "Get him to try hypnotherapy. That will wake up his brain."
When Sadie returns home, she finds her husband, comically, touching his erection through his pants and the two of them have sex.
Later, Ryan visits a hypnotherapist, resulting immediately in flashbacks to Ryan in his astronaut helmet. He performs a spacewalk, sees something outside the spaceship, and starts screaming. Ryan, however, says nothing about this memory to his hypnotherapist.
Three minutes after starting hypnosis, the hypnotherapist announces, "Time's up for today."
Meanwhile, at their house, Sadie vomits into the bathroom sink. (This is the film's most creative shot, as she vomits directly onto the camera.) In the time it takes to say "XTRO," Sadie takes a pregnancy test and realizes she is pregnant.
Ryan arrives home, after randomly walking around Australia and seeing things that look like UFOs everywhere (i.e., in children's murals and a playground). Ryan appears to know his wife is pregnant without her telling him, so they have a celebratory drink of champagne. This is another comedic scene, with Ryan dancing amusingly while drinking his champagne, though the reasons behind his dancing remain unclear.
After they run out of wine, Ryan walks down the street and eventually wanders into a bar where a woman ends her stand-up comedy set (we don't hear any of the jokes, unfortunately) by saying, "This club sucks. I'm out of here."
At the bar, Ryan orders a glass of champagne, and then he is hit on by a woman in a sparkly top who tells him, after she glances at his groin, "I think I need a drink."
"You want one?" Ryan asks her.
"Sure, why not?" she says, and the bartender gives her a glass of champagne. The two of them start kissing. When they leave the bar and walk through a parking structure, they are surprised to see Sadie, who has gone out looking for Ryan. She grabs his hand and pulls him away from the woman in the sparkly top. After they leave, she rolls her eyes and says, for some reason, "Couple space cadets."
When Sadie and Ryan return home, instead of arguing, they sit on the couch watching a UFO documentary.
The next morning in the kitchen, Sadie tells Ryan, "Look, I'm prepared to forgive you. I'm pregnant now. We have to set new ground rules."
"Okay," Ryan replies. "Whatever you say."
"Go get ready. I'll take us out."
"Out? Where are we going?"
"You'll see. It's exactly what the doctor ordered."
Sadie drives them to a big open park. "This is it," she explains. "This is where we had our first picnic. I thought it'd be perfect to rekindle our flame."
"Sorry, I don't remember," Ryan says.
Of course, this is the scene of the earlier flashback, where Ryan buried his NASA key ring in the dirt. She quickly finds the spot, digs a little, and then abandons her search, frustrated. The key ring is gone!
Instead of the park, Ryan wants to go to the high school with the murals of UFOs on the walls. In a flashback, he tells Sadie that UFOs made contact near the school. Sadie drags him back home.
Later, the final straw occurs that convinces Sadie something is seriously wrong with Ryan: Her friend Abbey calls her and tells her she saw Ryan jogging at the park but he didn't stop to say hi!
"What?" Sadie says over the phone. "Maybe he had his iPod on or something, like he didn't hear you?"
"No, I don't think so."
Of course, such an occurrence can only be conclusive proof that Ryan is an alien.
In fact, moments later, the bedroom door opens and Ryan appears wearing his NASA jumpsuit, but now he is in an alien form.
Alien Ryan gestures toward Sadie and she falls to the floor, clutching her pregnant belly.
The film cuts to the hospital, where Sadie arrives to visit her grandmother but is informed her grandmother has passed in the night. While at the empty hospital bed, Sadie has pains, helpfully explained by quick cuts to images of the fetus inside her.
Sadie sits in her car, afraid to go home. She gets a sudden phone call from John Smith of NASA Intelligence, who tells her Ryan has "gone rogue." "You do know it's not Ryan anymore," he says. "Ryan's gone."
Meanwhile, Ryan continues walking around town, obsessed with school murals about aliens and UFOs. This time, he is followed by a female NASA secret agent. A male agent joins her and they track Ryan to a clearing. Ryan begins transforming into his alien form again.
Meanwhile, Sadie goes inside her house, feels the fetus moving inside her, and eats some rat poison, presumably so the half-alien baby will not be born.
The filmmakers intercut Sadie's self-poisoning with Alien Ryan jogging away from the NASA agents, until Ryan suddenly has a vision of an alien baby in a field.
The agents, who all curiously wear ill-fitting suits, converge around Alien Ryan with their stun guns.
However, Ryan is apparently rescued when a UFO arrives and beams white light in the general vicinity.
One of the NASA agents says, "It is real!"
Then the film cuts to the end credits, uninterested in explaining what happens next.
The End
Alien Love is definitely not an excuse for a middle-aged man to make love to several attractive, generally Asian, younger women, even though it was written by, produced by, and stars an actor who, in many films, makes love to attractive, generally Asian, younger women. Instead, Alien Love is about the bond of love shared by an attractive Asian woman and a middle-aged Australian man that is tested when the man is either replaced by or inhabited by or possessed by an alien of some kind who likes to job slowly through suburban Australia. It is also about NASA, whose Australian branch is apparently extremely busy searching for aliens and UFOs. As a collaboration between writer/star Nathan Hill and UFO/occult documentarian Simon Oliver, Alien Love is a near-perfect depiction of modern UFO mysteries, as well as what it is like to jog slowly through suburban Australia. Kudos to the filmmakers for their success in realizing something so difficult, so specific, and yet so universal.