Milla Jovovich ("Multi-pass!") plays Abbey, a psychologist in Nome, Alaska who lost her husband through very mysterious circumstances--he was stabbed to death in bed by an unknown assailant, with Abbey laying right beside him. Abbey never saw the face of the man who killed her husband, and even after undergoing hypnosis by her fellow shrink Abel (Elias Koteas), Abbey still can’t get a decent image of her husband’s murderer from her memory. But Abbey isn’t the only one who’s having problems--most of her patients are reporting having trouble with sleepless nights, and strange dreams concerning an owl.
When Abbey hypnotizes a couple of her patients, all hell breaks loose when she unleashes their horrifying memories of unnatural intruders breaking into their homes in the middle of the night and abducting them. One of her patients is so traumatized that he winds up killing his family and himself. What makes the situation even more bizzare is when Abbey asks her secretary to type up some notes that she’d made into a tape recorder, it’s discovered that Abbey herself was a victim of these nocturnal kidnappers when she and Abel listen to her being abducted from her very bedroom right on the tape.
The Fourth Kind--which refers to the type of alien contact where a person is
abducted by them--is one of these annoying movies that’s almost good. There’s a
great story hidden somewhere in this film, which is supposed to be based on a
"true" story (but isn't). Yet the film is nothing more than a pretentious
mish-mash of scenes with Jovovich and the other actors in a regular fictitious
portrayal that’s edited together with "real-life" interviews of the "real"
person whom this event "really" happened to. The result is a gratingly
irritating film that keeps pulling you out of the story with the constant,
jarring back and forth between the fictional and the "real life" scenes.
Personally, I find the idea of aliens traveling billions of miles across space
just to molest people (along with assorted farm animals) here on earth to be really ridiculous. But I have no
problems with fictional alien-abduction stories, like Altered.
And if The Fourth Kind had ditched the silly "THIS IS ALL REAL" premise and went
with just a straight on telling of its story, we probably would have had
something pretty interesting here. Instead, the constant, hyped-up insistence
that all of this actually occurred lends the film a sleazy quality (the bold
titles introducing the actors in mid-film looks like the sort of hyperbole you’d
expect from Ed Wood) that just makes it very hard to take seriously, even as a
fictional story.
--SF
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