Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Kinda Feel Left Out (Sundance Edition!)
Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Kinda Feel Left Out played the 2023 Sundance Film Festival.
STORY: B-
Itsy’s (Supergirl’s Emma Tremblay) family moves from the big city to the middle of nowhere, resulting in a life sentence of eternal boredom. Things change when she meets fellow high school senior Calvin Kipler (Let the Right One In’s Jacob Buster), the class outcast who’s convinced his parents were abducted by aliens ten years earlier.
In our own universe, people often think describing a movie as “wholesome” is code for “lame”, but this wholesome film begs to differ. Sure, you won’t spot any drugs, booze, foul language, or hanky panky orbiting this movie. Its edgiest moments are chock full of fifth-grade fart jokes. But it’s a fun story that manages to be both entertaining and mildly moving.
PEOPLE: B+
The chemistry between Tremblay and Buster is out of this world. Their slow burn relationship never misses a step, rambling from cool curiosity to friendship to “perhaps more?” Ttremblay plays her character with enough confidence and passion to make you believe Itsy’s mature beyond her years. But her emotional blind spots are easy (for us) to see, making her a perfectly imperfect teenager. Buster dials Calvin’s oddness to a magical, difficult to find frequency. He plays him so outlandishly that it’s understandable why most people would want to avoid him. Yet at the same time, his charm completely wins over anyone willing to spend more than a few seconds with him. Buster is certainly a talent we’ll want to keep our eyes on.
FILM NERD STUFF: B-
Logs don’t always get the respect they deserve. That’s right, I’m talking about chopped down tree parts. Some people use them to build cabins. Others build high priced bougie furniture pieces. And these ingenious filmmakers use them to build comedic tension and character depth.
At one point, Itsy and Calvin go off to gather firewood. It’s hard to spoil this scene (because even seven year olds will see what’s coming from light years away), but I’ll still do my best not to. They are about to do something that is rather difficult to do when two people are carrying sizable armfuls of logs. Their inability to see a few steps ahead and deal with the logs sweetly illustrates their youth and anxiety. The conundrum also sprinkles some humor on what would otherwise be a pretty straightforward scene. Big props to the props team.
THIS MUST BE THE PLACE (Elective Class): B+
Calvin and Itsy both have pretty short lists of the things they think will make them happy. For Itsy, it’s the big city she just left behind. Calvin believes his only path to joy or fulfillment is to reunite with his parents. In a way, they’re both searching for a way to go back to the lives they had.
The problem with only having one thing on your happy list is that you begin to cling to it far too tightly. Doing that often blinds you to all the other amazing and surprising possibilities lying right in front of your eyes.
Do we find happiness in people or in places? I think the movie definitely has an opinion about that question, but the film’s strength lies in refusing to accept a binary answer. It can be both. It is both. I’ll leave you to decide precisely what the film believes about happiness, but there’s no denying it’s got some really touching things to say.
FINAL COMMENTS:
Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out isn’t prestige cinema, but like a good-natured game show host, it asks important questions of its characters while making sure the audience has a blast. It’s charming. It’s genuine. It’s a great ride.