Film Review: 'Fourth Kind' tries too hard to be real

Photo by Universal Pictures, Simon Vesrano

Milla Jovovich is shown in a scene from "The Fourth Kind."

The Fourth Kind” is a “found footage” horror movie with a few new tweaks, though not enough to escape a certain clunkiness.

At the onset of Olatunde Osunsanmi’s film, actress Milla Jovovich addresses the camera to announce that she’ll be playing real-life Alaska psychologist Abigail Emily Tyler in re-enactments of actual events.

These re-enactments, we are assured, are based on genuine video and sound recordings of Tyler and her patients in Nome. At various times “Fourth Kind” employs a split screen to play side-by-side the re-enactments and the original grainy clinical recordings which inspired them.

To convince us that the “real” footage is just that, the actors who appear in them don’t get a screen credit, lest that ruin the illusion Osunsanmi is striving for.

In the wake of the mysterious death of her husband, Abbey continues her study of patients with sleep disorders.

Dozens of locals report awaking at night and being confronted by a white owl. Under hypnosis their memories get so intense they become psychotic; after one such session a distraught patient shoots his family and himself.

Harried by a local lawman (Will Patton) who holds her responsible for the deaths, Abbey calls in a fellow psychologist from Anchorage (Elias Koteas) to provide counsel and support.

What they uncover is a pattern of alien abductions going back decades — close encounters of the fourth kind. (In case you’re wondering, the first kind is an alien sighting, the second is actual evidence and the third is contact.)

Sound recordings of these abductions reveal a voice speaking an unknown tongue — an expert (Hakeem Kae-Kazim) says it’s ancient Sumerian, a language unheard for 6,000 years.

And when Abbey’s little girl vanishes one night, things get kicked into overdrive.

“The Fourth Kind” delivers a few goose bumps (Osunsanmi samples not only Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” but also “The Exorcist”), but in the end the film is more desultory than disturbing.

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