Mark Reviews Movies: SKYMAN

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 29, 2020

The pieces are in place for a slow-burning horror movie of the found-footage/faux-documentary variety, but instead, writer/director Daniel Myrick's Skyman is a fascinating kind of fake-out. It's more a character piece about a man who has spent three decades convinced that the purpose of his life was set at the age of 10. Because of that, he never really had a chance of having much of a life.

The premise has an unseen film crew following Carl Merryweather (Michael Selle), who claims to have been visited by an alien in the desert as a child. Ever since, he has been researching aliens and UFOs, hoping to prove those skeptical of his experience wrong.

Carl believes he'll prove it definitively on his 40th birthday. That's the day the alien, which communicated telepathically, said it would return for Carl.

The story, convincingly presented as an amateur documentary, has Carl preparing for this visitation. Meanwhile, he and his sister Gina (Nicolette Sweeney) relate how Carl's obsession has made him an outsider and incapable of doing anything else.

Myrick's screenplay does two things. First, it plays a long game of setting up the promise of some suspense, leading up to the possibility of an alien encounter. That doesn't work too well (although there's a jump scare that's quite effective, if only because the filmmaker evades any tricks for so long), but it almost doesn't matter because of the movie's second, albeit primary, goal.

That's to give us a sense of Carl as a man trapped and undermined by extraordinary, probably false expectations for his life. Here is a lonely and isolated man, seen as a weirdo by many (including his ailing mother) and unable to connect to his sister, who might be the only person who loves Carl without any reservations. Both Selle and Sweeney are authentic enough to add to the illusion of the movie's setup.

The character work here is partially and then entirely pushed to the side, though, once the crew, Carl, Gina, and Carl's friend Marcus (Faleolo Alailima) arrive in the desert for a weekend. Like its protagonist, Skyman has its own expectations to fulfill, mainly in terms of generating suspense, laying out little mysteries, and answering the movie's big one. Myrick's heart, which finds so much sympathy for Carl and Gina, just doesn't seem to be into the movie's inevitable turn toward the horror elements.

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