Sundance 2023: A lot seems familiar from other teen movies — and other Sundance movies — but the young ensemble carries this to the stratosphere
Steve Olpin/Sundance Institute
“Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out” is one of those great long titles that rarely ends up connected to a great movie, long or otherwise. For every “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain” (genuinely good) there’s always a handful of “The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies” (genuinely bad) ruining the loquacious fun for everybody.
“Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out” is the latest film from director Jake Van Wagoner (“Christmastime,” aka “My Brother the Time Traveler”), starring Emma Tremblay (“Supergirl”) as Itsy Levan, one of those teenagers in movies who moves from the big city to the small town while wearing headphones in the backseat of her parents car because, like, “life,” you know? Dang it.
Itsy’s got the prerequisite annoying brother, Evan (Kenneth Cummins, “The Christmas Bow”), who farts and loves maps, and the pre-requisite dippy parents (Matt Biedel and Hailey Smith), who get weirdly excited about the darnedest things. When the opportunity finally comes along to ground one of their kids for the first time, you can practically hear the goosebumps arise as they eagerly brainstorm all the banal chores they can dish out that would be bad, but not too bad. They don’t wanna be jerks about it.
They’ve all moved from the city (never mind which one) to the tiny rural town of Pebble Falls, where there’s nothing much to do, and the only point of interest is the local eccentric kid, Calvin, played by Jacob Buster (Showtime’s “Let the Right One In”). He thinks his parents were abducted by aliens ten years ago and he’s spent that last decade tracking down comets, studying trajectories, and building himself a space suit which he wears to school, even though everybody thinks it’s weird. But he thinks it’s neat and he likes himself this way.
Calvin is such a smart, friendly, interesting person that it’s genuinely surprising when Itsy is invited by one of her obviously mean fellow classmates to write an exposé about him for a journalism competition, and she actually goes for it. Sure this gives her — and, by extension, the audience — an excuse to hang out with Calvin and get to know him better, but while her parents claim she never studies, Itsy doesn’t seem obtuse enough for this plot point to make sense. She wants to get out of this town, and winning a fancy competition might do the trick, but any clearheaded person could tell that writing a hit piece on a lovable kook probably isn’t the kind of thing that wins prizes, assuming the contest is even real at all. (Itsy never actually sees the website or anything; she just takes it on faith.)
“Aliens Abducted My Parents” is, for the most part, a collection of teen-movie and Sundance-Film-Festival clichés, but at least the collection is lovingly curated. The bratty brother, the clueless parents, the relationship based on lies, and even the third-act road trip are straight out of the handbook. If you look closely, you can even see that one of Calvin’s shirts has the same color stripes as Stargirl’s sweater. He’s the less commonly known but still totally-a-thing Manic Pixie Dream Boy.
And then there’s the sci-fi angle, where Calvin insists that aliens are real and that his parents (played by Will Forte and Elizabeth Mitchell) are coming back to him on a regularly-scheduled comet. It’s possible this is all just a means of escaping an unacceptable reality where he was simply abandoned, or it’s possible that the fantastic is truly real. Shades of “Safety Not Guaranteed” and Mark Romanek’s “Static” abound, making one wonder whether “Aliens Abducted My Parents” is really going somewhere wild or if it’s using all this fancifulness as a means of exploring how young people living on their own, with limited access to mental-health services, process trauma.
Still, it’s satisfying to discover that while “Aliens Abducted My Parents” isn’t reinventing the wheel, it rolls along quite nicely. The plot goes where it’s going, usually quite predictably, but the screenplay by Austin Everett is full of amiable dialogue and enjoyable characters. There’s only one great big laugh in the movie, but the tone stays light enough to call it a comedy without using any quotation marks. And the finale, without giving anything away, mostly satisfies.
It would be wonderful to say that “Aliens Abducted My Parents” fully grasps the heartache inherent to the premise, but its effervescent tone kinda flattens out the heavier moments, especially since most of them are visible from a mile around the bend. There are heartbreaking revelations that should be soul-destroyers for at least one or two of the characters involved, but they’re such pleasant people that they process it better than you might expect. The film is almost mature to a minor fault.
But while “Aliens Abducted My Parents” can be a little rote, its greatest function isn’t as a delivery system for drama, or humor, or even coming-of-age clichés. This is one of those movies about young people where, regardless of whether you like it or find it a little bland, you’re grateful that it introduced you to these cast members. Emma Tremblay is incredibly engaging, despite waging war against a screenplay that can’t decide how clueless she is, and Kenneth Cummins is the kind of scene-stealing child actor who seems destined to headline “Home Alone 7: The Deadly Art of Illusion” or whatever it’ll end up being called.
Then there’s Jacob Buster, who somehow manages to enter the film in a homemade spacesuit and make it look good. He’s such an effortlessly charming dude that it almost ruins “Aliens Abducted My Parents,” because the whole plot is that people think he’s weird and unlikable yet he’s absolutely riveting to be around. He’s such a spectacular lead that it practically ruins the plot, but it’s hard to care because you’re so happy to hang out with him and his weird techno gadgets and godawful snack experiments. (Oreos in orange juice? Are we really making that a thing?)
“Aliens Abducted My Parents” is a pretty good movie, all things considered, but it’s more interesting for its parts than their overall sum. The actual movie is a bit generic except for a handful of memorable bits, but within all that mild teen Sundance farina are promising performers making a name for themselves as well as a filmmaker who clearly understands how this material works –he isn’t going to break the mold when the old mold still works reasonably fine.
“Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Kinda Feel Left Out” makes its world premiere at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
