When Richard Dreyfuss walked onto the Mothership at the end of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” it was just about the first time — and also nearly the last — that a movie hero voluntarily went on any such ride. More familiar notes of terror and disorientation come with the UFO territory of Peter Cilella’s “Descendent.” It has “The Walking Dead’s” Ross Marquand as a working-class Southern Californian whose world comes unglued once he suffers an apparent alien abduction. Occupying the slippery-reality realm of “Jacob’s Ladder,” this effective first feature, debuting at SXSW, limns its protagonist’s unraveling with suspenseful skill.
But those expecting straightforward sci-fi horror may resent the writer-director’s insistence on sticking to an ambiguity, played somewhere between the narrative models of “Communion” and “Mysterious Skin.” Cilella never fully resolves whether our protagonist is, indeed, the victim of extraterrestrial meddling or instead suffering delusions triggered by delayed childhood-trauma memories, leaving the story suspended in irresolution.
In a small community on the outskirts of Los Angeles, Sean (Marquand) is awaiting the arrival of their first child with spouse Andrea (Sarah Bolger). He seems preoccupied though, partly from worry that he isn’t an ideal provider — he has the rather low-end job of a harried security guard at a local school. Some “well-meaning” types in their extended-family circle poorly disguise their view of him as a hapless loser. Nonetheless, Andrea likes her job (whatever that is), and assures him they’ll be fine.
She grows more concerned when her husband wakes up in the hospital. It looks as though he’d fallen off the school roof while trying to fix an exterior light fixture. But Sean recalls a bright object approaching him out of the sky— then being subjected to invasive procedures in an otherworldly environment, alongside other constrained human captives.
Surely that can’t have really happened. Doubt is further seeded by our eventual realization that Sean’s mother died in childbirth and his father took his own life a few years later. Is imminent fatherhood dislodging deep-seated insecurities Sean has held back for decades? Yet now he has escalating nightmares, waking visions, seeming flashbacks, blackouts, confessing to “a hard time deciding what’s real and what’s a dream.” He suddenly develops heightened hearing, enabling him to eavesdrop on distant conversations… though maybe those are just hallucinations too. There’s certainly no explaining why, despite zero prior artistic talent, he begins creating elaborate paintings and sketches of a disturbingly “alien” nature, often failing to recall later on that he’s made them.
“I feel like I’m trapped somewhere far away. I don’t know how to get out, and they won’t let me out” he tells his increasingly uneasy wife. Once her pregnancy develops complications, she worries his mental absences and erratic behavior have gained precedence over her own time of need. Everybody fears the worst when Sean decides he needs a gun — not a safe accessory for an apparent mental health crisis.
“Descendent” is very good at shading the leading characters’ distress, as what appears to be a fairly ideal partnership (despite some outside naysayers) gets pried apart by developments neither party can control. Marquand’s performance is strongly sympathetic — yet we’re not sure whether to trust him, either. His interactions with authority figures, including a counselor (Aisha Camille Kabia) and his rather awful “Aunt” Robin (Susan Wilder), suggest long-term anger issues that his marriage had hitherto muffled.
The more fantastical aspects are held in reserve, but can’t be discounted as entirely Sean’s invention. When a dog mysteriously appears in his home, it’s exactly like the one he had as a boy two decades earlier — and real enough that he must surrender its care to best friend Christian (Dan O’Brien).
That unwillingness to resolve the central mystery lends “Descendent” psychological tension, but also dissipates it after a while, as the film’s low-key climactic events only reinforce its narrative ambivalence. Nor does the movie stylistically choose between genre piece and character drama, straddling both in a non-hyperbolic way that is atmospheric, nuanced and well-crafted, if also eventually a little frustrating.
There’s a deliberation to Cilella’s approach that feels astute and draws on the solid cast’s strengths. But in the end, you may guiltily wish he were less cagey about just what has happened to Sean. Because after 90 minutes or so we — like his loved ones — have begun to lose patience with having no idea whether he’s a man besieged, or his own worst problem.
