After having its world premiere at last week’s Telluride Film Festival, I was pretty intrigued by Michael Pearce’s Encounter. I mean, how could you not? It’s hard not to be excited anytime a film stars Academy Award nominee Riz Ahmed and Academy Award winner Octavia Spencer. However, despite that intrigue and excitement for the film, Encounter’s exciting premise is muddled with messy transitions and a narrative switch that ultimately detours the movie from good to the mediocre category.
Encounter kicks off with an asteroid crash and the forming of microscopic insects amid a planetary infestation. After a unique opening sequence, we meet Malik (Ahmed), a former soldier whose behavior belies his paranoia. He sprays himself with bug spray and obsesses over reports about unknown viruses while seemingly on a mission to save humanity from this alien species that infects humans through bug bites. Elsewhere, his estranged sons Jay (Lucian-River Chauhan) and Bobby (Aditya Geddada) live with their mother and her new husband. Wouldn’t you know it., she gets bitten by a mosquito, leading to Malik thinking he needs to “rescue” his children from their infected mother.
When the film works best is in its quieter moments between Malki, Jay, and Bobby. The trio is fantastic together through good times and bad. It’s hard to imagine Riz Ahmed giving a bad performance, and it continues with Encounter. He fully embraces the commitment of embodying the character and provides a complex and dark portrayal. Will he receive another Oscar nomination for this role? Probably not, but it’s hard to ignore the greatness Ahmed presents in this film.
Of the two-child actors, Lucian-River Chauhan stood out with his honest and authentic take. Despite being too young to grasp everything that’s going on truly, Chauhan provides layers of a child who wants to help his father at any cost. Aditya Geddada offers comic relief and is a delight to watch in his first career performance.
The film begins to lose me in its third act, where it sheds its quiet, subtle narrative to offer a fair share of violence. The FBI begins to hunt Malik and it just muddles the earlier father/sons story. Along with that, Octavia Spencer’s talents are wasted. There was an exciting subplot where we could have dived more into the complex relationship between her and Malik. Still, instead, she is mainly in the backdrop, dropping exposition left and right.
There are plenty of films out there that offer up a narrative shift. However, with Encounter, the change in tone felt more Shyamalan-esque and left me empty inside at the film’s conclusion. Rather than continuing to have the audience fully invested in its characters, Pearce and company got too cute for their own good and ruined my experience with the film.
Encounter will open in select theaters on December 3rd, followed by Amazon Prime Video beginning December 10th.
