DARK ENCOUNTER

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND CONFESSIONS

I admit it: way back in the mists of time, I used to have a passing interest in UFOs. I wasn't an obsessive or anything, but I did feel it was at least possible that Earth had been, and still was, visited by beings from other worlds for reasons utterly unfathomable to mere humans. This was around the time of the alleged alien autopsy video, Mulder and Scully, and the tinfoil hat brigade building huge Geocities websites to expose all the Area 51 conspiracies and decode the crop circles that always appeared about an hour after closing time. We even had a talk from the bloke from the Ministry Of Defence once night. The Truth Was Out There. Except that it wasn't: once you've sat watching slow-motion replays of wobbly night-vision footage of green blobs hovering somewhere over Mexico City, and overheard a couple of earnest Trekkies theorising that the reason the blobs disappeared into the sub-VHS murk was because the alien ships had activated their cloaking devices, it suddenly all seemed very silly. I never went back.

Still, I'm a sucker for a good alien movie: not so much the full-on CGI destructo porn of something like Battle: Los Angeles or Independence Day, more the mysterious presence in the woods like Fire In The Sky. Dark Encounter happily plays more on that smaller scale: individuals rather than continents. Exactly a year after an eight-year-old girl vanished without trace, her family are assailed by a series of bright lights, noises, objects moving, electrical disturbances and creatures Not Of This Earth in the basement - and half the family similarly vanishing. Were these creatures involved in the child's disappearance? Is there a reason for this latest visitation?

Set in Pennsylvania but shot in Yorkshire with a mostly British cast playing American, Dark Encounter's central setpiece is a terrific extended home (rather than planetary) invasion sequence for which writer-director Carl Strathie breaks out the huge beams of fiery orange and icy blue lights shining through curtains and blinds, giving the whole thing the feel of the similar sequences in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. This is easily the best scene in the movie and there are moments when it definitely hits that Spielbergian sense of awe (it's a pity the score isn't up to John Williams though), but the trouble is that the rest of the movie isn't that interesting. Moreover, the reasons for the mysterious beings' presence and interference is just plain nonsense: if they've gone to all this trouble for this, why not for all other instances? If they're so wise and benevolent, why do they terrorise people with bright lights and abductions? (This last question could also be asked of Close Encounters, of course.)

Result: the more you think about it the less sense it makes - was it a dream? Were they really aliens? One whizzy special effects moment (similar to the final shot of Men In Black) and the superb siege/invasion sequence aside, the film doesn't really hang together well enough, you don't really care and by the end you're just bemused by the silliness. The good doesn't entirely outweigh the not so good, but at its best it's interesting and thrilling enough to scrape through.

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