THE BECOMERS - Mark Reviews Movies

The Becomers, Dark Star Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 22, 2024

A pair of aliens arrive on Earth, take over the identities of various humans to fit in, and dissolve the bodies of those whose lives they've infiltrated. From that, The Becomers might sound like a science-fiction thriller or horror story. However, writer/director Zach Clark gradually reveals a twisted sense of humor in this material, before arriving at an optimistic conclusion that is, weirdly enough, quite human.

It's all about the perspective in this case, since we don't follow humans close to the aliens or some Earthling who begins to suspect that something is amiss here. No, the entire story is told from the perspective of one of those invaders, an unnamed entity (The name might be unpronounceable and almost certainly unspellable, anyway) whose story on their (The aliens intentionally use gender-neutral pronouns, for reasons that become pretty apparent when we witness their process of "conjoining") distant home world unfolds by way of occasional narration (provided by Russell Mael, best known as half of the eclectic music act Sparks).

In the film, then, the two aliens are played by assorted actors, doing double-duty as the inevitable victims of the extraterrestrial's subversive fitting-in strategy and those aliens as copies of those now-dead humans. Some of the humans—such as a poor woman named Francesca (Isabel Alamin), whose only mistake is going into labor while driving and not having a charged cellphone on her, and a Chicago bus driver named Debbie (Jacquelyn Haas), who's known and liked by everyone in her apartment building—seem like genuinely good people.

Others who fall victim to the aliens, of course, aren't, such as the hunter who tries to kill the first alien and becomes their initial identity or the suburban couple whom the pair of aliens mimic the longest. As for why those two humans aren't especially sympathetic, that's one of the few surprises of the plot.

The real surprise of the film, though, is how Clark balances the early oddity and minor terror of the aliens' behavior, the development of some clever satire about how odd some of these humans seem when compared to what we learn about the aliens' former lives, and that final turn toward genuine emotion. It starts as a story about survival at all costs, but by the end, we start thinking about another notion that might also be a universal constant and the best reason to keep on surviving in the first place.

The whole of the tale is set around Chicago—in small towns with rural areas where no one will notice an alien attacking people for their identities, in bigger ones with large stores where the parking lot is a good place for an alien to hunt for a potential new look, in a quiet suburb where the only the threat is the neighbors wondering why the previously pleasant couple has been so distant as of late. Our alien protagonist has to do some juggling upon arriving on Earth, once the cops start to wonder about the disappearance of "Francesca" and what the "woman" might have done.

That leads the alien to Carol (Molly Plunk), a seemingly ordinary suburban housewife shopping for things at a hardware store about an hour from her house. After "Francesca" helps her load stuff into her minivan, Carol offers the stranger a ride. By the time the van arrives, Carol is no more, since the alien is now "Carol," who can live in comfort, eating odd combinations of food and learning from a smart device in the house, while waiting for their lover to find them.

Again, the rest of the plot—involving Carol's husband Gordon (Mike Lopez), who eventually becomes "Carol's" lover "Gordon"—is a twisted surprise, which delves into the paranoia of the story's backdrop during the COVID-19 pandemic and the comedy of errors that happens when the aliens realize just how weird some of these humans can be. That shift in sympathy is smartly handled, as the comedy of the aliens' awkward behavior and specific biology is eventually overshadowed by the sinister but incompetent nature of the people behind the plot's most significant development.

Through all of this, we learn about the aliens' home planet, which sounds perfectly ordinary, apart from some distinct verbiage to describe food and other things, and, at times, uncomfortably familiar. The alien lovers' story might as well be a human one, given the couple's cute meeting, first string of dates, background of going to school and having jobs (One makes ceramic art, of all things), story of losing touch and eventually reconnecting later.

At the same time, the planet began to undergo a series of natural crises, which were overlooked or ignored until it was too late. The backdrop of the pandemic, then, becomes more relevant than it might seem at first, and the rest of the allegory is right there, although it does feel like bad luck for the aliens that they escape one climate crisis only to arrive on this particular planet at this particular moment. They have the option to escape, at least.

The irony of all this isn't lost on the film. Indeed, it's kind of the larger point of The Becomers, which establishes its aliens as an invasive species with only basic survival on their mind, only to give us a cast of humans who seem to have forgotten that. The aliens' thinking adapts and evolves with what they learn, though, and as for us, the jury is still out.

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