Mark Reviews Movies: PROXIMITY

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 14, 2020

As the story of Proximity progresses, writer/director Eric Demeusy shifts between three ideas. The first is fairly clever. The second is plainly generic. The third is, well, downright weird, reaching for levels of significance that the movie hasn't even suggested until that point.

The plot focuses on Isaac (Ryan Masson), a young scientist working for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. While out for a hike with a video camera (His therapist suggests he should keep a video diary to deal with unspecified emotional issues that never come up again), a series of meteorites crash to the ground.

He encounters an alien, records it on camera, and is abducted by a flying saucer (The visual effects here aren't special, but they get the job done). A few days later, he returns.

Demeusy's first plot concept sees Isaac trying to convince the world that his alien encounter was real, but he's met with skepticism and mockery from the media, various experts in assorted fields, and people in the online comments. It's a familiar setup for such a story, but there's some promise in seeing how quickly and widely such news, as well as the inevitable cynicism about it, can spread.

That notion disappears for the movie's second act, which has Issac and Sara (Highdee Kuan), another alien-abductee, being captured by a semi-secretive agency. There's nothing of much interest here, since the story's new direction is even more obvious than the previous one. We get some chases and laser-blaster shootouts, but at least there's the amusing detail of androids—clearly people wearing white work clothes and helmets—with cross-eyed visages.

The third act does attempt to bring the story to a more personal level. Since these characters are only defined by their respective alien abductions, there isn't much personality to explore. In the build-up to the aliens' imminent arrival, Isaac, Sara, and abductee-in-hiding Carl (Don Scribner) wait around in a remote cabin for their experiences to be confirmed.

The finale of Proximity features the aliens and a predictable standoff with that government agency. It's the vague but wild details of the aliens, their mission, and their discoveries about the nature of the universe (A religious figure makes an odd cameo, making us wonder if the whole movie is some kind of evangelical allegory) that elevate this material to truly head-scratching territory—and not in a good way.

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