Posted in: Movies, Review | Tagged: comedy, dark sky films, indie film, satire, science fiction, The Becomers, Zach Clark

The Becomers: A Darkly Comic Alien Invasion Where Humans are Nuts

The Becomers is an indie low-budget SciFi dark comedy about body snatching aliens who arrive in at a really bad time in America: the present

Imagine Invasion of the Body Snatchers from the aliens' point of view as a melancholy love story, and you'll get The Becomers. Instead of trying to take over the world, the aliens are two lovers who just want to start a new life together on Earth after escaping their dying planet. Now, they have to find each other, jumping from one body to another while perpetually perplexed by the oddness and absurdity of human life. Then things get crazier and even more complicated when one of them jumps into the worst people in the worst place at the worst time. Hilarity ensues.

The Becomers Don't Like What They Have to Become

The Becomers is a fish-out-of-water comedy tinged with sadness, narrated by Russell Mael, lead singer of the renowned musical duo Sparks, voicing one of the aliens recalling their lives on their native planet. The lovers aren't an invading force on a mission, just ordinary people in love trying to find a new home. They got separated on Earth and are determined to see each other, moving through an American landscape of dysfunction and increasing paranoia that becomes an allegory for immigrant life in a chaotic America. It's completely informed by the chaos America entered during the COVID era that the country still hasn't fully recovered from in real life. Conspiracy theorists abound, and friends become alienated. Some of them become radicalized. There are reflections of headline news when one of the aliens hops into the bodies of a couple that's become radicalized into an inept Qanon-style sect planning on kidnapping the governor and ritually sacrificing him.

"The Becomers" is an apt title for a tale about aliens on the wrong foot as they worry about what they're going to become when they take over the bodies of humans, more specifically Americans, even more specifically very messed up Americans who may have lost their minds. It's a premise that's automatically funny: the people whose bodies they took over were already weird, having gone nuts from the Pandemic and buying into QAnon lunacy. The aliens' increasing bewilderment at discovering what these people were up to when they were already confused and bewildered by life on Earth is the joke that never stops being funny throughout the story. The madness they encounter only adds to their desperation and loneliness as they yearn for their lover, giving the story its heart. Writer-director Zach Clark understands the fundamental theme of Science Fiction, which is the question of what makes us human, and here the aliens are us, their sadness and love for each other is what makes them more human that the self-obsessed American humans whose narcissism has landed them into madness. In the end, the only thing that saves them, the only thing worth living for, is love.

The Becomers premiered on August 23rd in theaters and VOD on September 24th.

The Becomers

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Review by Adi Tantimedh

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8/10

A subversive and melancholy Science Fiction comedy of alien invasion from the aliens' point of view, The Becomers casts a satirical eye on an America thrown into chaos from the Pandemic where people have gone nuts from isolation and Qanon-style conspiracy theories where the aliens are us, bewildered by the madness they're witnessing with only their love and search for a home forming a melancholy allegory for the immigrant experience in present-day America.

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