MOVIE REVIEW

They try to get 'real' about strange occurrences. Instead they get ludicrous.

By Robert Abele

The vogue for verité spooks continues with "The Fourth Kind," but unlike the understated stylistic rigor of the first-person-fashioned "Paranormal Activity," this alien abduction showpiece about unexplained events in Nome, Alaska, doth protest its bona fides too much.

Presented as a cinematic re-creation of traumatic, mysterious occurrences -- suicides, stalking owls, demonic-sounding recordings -- surrounding sleep-deprived patients of psychologist Abigail Tyler (Milla Jovovich), writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi attempts an Orson Welles-like confluence of "real" and imagined that might have worked had he gotten out of the way more, literally and figuratively. As in, there's ludicrous video footage of a solemn Osunsanmi interviewing a gaunt, horror-stricken Tyler, as well as overwrought dramatizations featuring Tyler, a friendly, doubting colleague (Elias Koteas) and an all-skeptical sheriff (Will Patton).

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The irony is that the "documentary" moments of patients videotaped under hypnosis -- often regrettably placed side by side with their reenactments -- contain the only genuine shocks, whereas the "directed" scenes traffic in telegraphed scoring, excessive photographic effects and laughable histrionics. Trying to freak out an audience with a new twist on UFO sightings is admirable, but after the umpteenth time the words "Actual Audio" appear on-screen, one's patience for suspending disbelief in "The Fourth Kind" comes crashing to Earth.

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