Available on Amazon Prime Video, Encounter is a fantasy thriller brought to you by Riz Ahmed. The actor plays a father ready to do anything to save his children from an inhuman threat. Does this film deserve a look?
WHAT DOES IT TALK ABOUT ?
Two young brothers flee in the company of their father, who tries to protect them from an inhuman threat. During this dangerous journey, the boys will have to face hard truths and abandon their childhood.
WELL WORTH A LOOK ?
Passed through the Telluride and Toronto festivals, Encounter, Michael Pearce’s second feature film after Jersey Affair, is now available on Amazon Prime Video. This fantasy thriller he co-wrote with Joe Barton (The Ritual) stars Riz Ahmed as Malik Khan, a former Marine with a dark past who kidnaps his children Jay (Lucian-River Chauhan) and Bobby (Aditya Geddada) thinking to save them from a mysterious alien threat.
The breathtaking first sequence of the film shows how a parasite from elsewhere infiltrates human flesh and spreads throughout the individual’s body to control it. This incredible introduction hinted at a poetic SF thriller mixing the beauty of the image with the horror of an alien invasion but what could have been a masterful aesthetic tour de force and a story playing on a permanent tension unfortunately falls into melodrama easy in its second part.
Amazon Studios
Encounter juggles genres in a hazardous way and alternates between initiatory story and psychological investigation to form a whole mess, sometimes touching, sometimes simplistic. If the film summons up references from the genres whose outlines it sketches and seduces with its sublime photography and controlled staging, it becomes heavy when the vagueness around Malik’s intentions dissipates.
However, Riz Ahmed brings enormous depth and strength to this role of destroyed, paranoid, dangerous and mentally unstable father and succeeds in creating a real chemistry with his two young, impeccable partners. His remarkable performance proves that he is one of the most talented actors of his generation, between that role and his performance in Sound of Metal this year.
If Encounter’s twist may disappoint or thwart our expectations, the feature film rocked by a solid soundtrack remains an original proposal that explores the notions of fatherhood, primal fear and the consequences of post-traumatic stress and which turns out to be less a monster film than a psychological film about the demons that can lie dormant in each of us.
