UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS - Mark Reviews Movies

Unidentified Objects, Quiver Distribution

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Review by Mark Dujsik | June 1, 2023

Ostensibly the story of two people who don't feel a part of the world, Unidentified Objects gradually becomes a one-person show. That the character is fascinating and wholly relatable, despite all of the qualities that make him feel as if he doesn't fit, is an undeniable strength of director Juan Felipe Zuelta's debut feature. It's just a bit too unfortunate that Leland Frankel's screenplay doesn't make as much room for or find a similar level of interest in the other half of this duo.

She's Winona (Sarah Hay), a mysterious woman who knocks on the door of a relative stranger's apartment one morning. At one point, she overheard that this neighbor had a car, and Winona is in need of one for a trip from New York City to Canada, where, Winona says, she has to meet her sister at specific time in just three days. That's not the truth, of course, but she's willing to pay almost $2,000 to borrow the car.

The stranger is Peter (Matthew August Jeffers), a bitter loner with bills to pay, and he's willing to accept Winona's offer, as long as he can come along on the trip. The car belonged to a recently deceased friend of his, and Peter wants to stop at a beach that the two had planned to visit. After "borrowing" said car from the friend's brother, the two begin their road trip.

The story's hook, beyond the formula of two characters getting to know each other while taking a journey, is that Winona is convinced she has been selected by aliens, after a previous abduction, to become part of their interstellar travel. Peter doesn't believe her, of course, but money is money, while he'll get to fulfill his goal along the way.

Peter, who happens to be both gay and a dwarf, has pretty much given up on everything and especially everybody, after a lifetime of being ridiculed or otherwise judged and the loss of a friend who gave him at least some kind of kinship. Jeffers' performance lets this man be a miserable jerk without any apologies, but the actor taps into such depths of loneliness and pain that the character is immediately sympathetic, only to become more so along the way (A couple of dream sequences, particularly one at a bar, give us a real sense of his underlying guilt and need for some kind of connection).

As for Winona, Hay is also quite good, but beyond the gimmick of the character's objective and her hustling ways, there simply isn't much to her. The early stages of the screenplay hint at some potential for Winona, but she ultimately seems to exist here as a plot device—a reason for Peter to go on this trip and find some kind of meaning along the way. As a result, Unidentified Objects clearly succeeds in giving us one part of a two-part character study, which isn't quite enough.

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