By Thomas M. Puhr.
Far from great satire, but further proof that Clark is willing to take big swings, budget and taste be damned.”
While watching Zach Clark’s The Becomers (2023), I was reminded more than once of a web comic that was making the rounds on social media earlier this year. In it, alien invaders announce to earthlings their plans for world domination. The soon-to-be-harvested humans aren’t terrified, but relieved: “Oh, thank God,” they say. “Wait, what?” the aliens ask, nonplussed. The writer-director’s Little Sister (2016) follow-up– about a pair of body-snatching, romantically involved extraterrestrials trying to make it in Middle America – taps into the same sort of defeated irony. Intellectually superior beings from another galaxy taking the wheel of this dying planet? We should be so lucky.
Via a voiceover (provided by Sparks lead singer Russell Mael) from one of the unnamed aliens, we learn of a distant home that sounds depressingly familiar. “It was clear that our lives had permanently changed,” a deadpan Mael recalls: “Our security, our sustainability, our old jobs, and our favorite foods were gone forever.” To escape these economic and ecological hardships – as well as a COVID-like virus that ravaged their planet (“I attended school over holo-phone. I’ll never forget those uncertain months, scared and snuggled inside our little pods.”) – the couple volunteered to be the first pioneer-like visitors to Earth (specifically, suburban Illinois). Talk about out of the frying pan and into the dumpster fire.
They arrive separately, so the opening act follows one extraterrestrial as it navigates its new home, absorbs the native language by imitating a Fox-like news show, and disguises its glowing, neon-blue eyes with colored contacts. The first body it snatches belongs to the hunter (Conrad Dean) who stumbles upon the UFO’s crash site, the second to a pregnant woman named Francesca (Isabel Alamin). Neither host proves all that promising, but the ideal victim finally seems to appear in the form of Carol (Molly Plunk), a suburban housewife who shares a large prefab home with husband Gordon (Mike Lopez). After summoning its partner with a trill-like mating call, the alien is reunited with its lover. The two successfully assume Carol’s and Gordon’s bodies and celebrate with a night of lovemaking, which consists of fingering triangular, goopy slits in their abdomens. The two can now assimilate in peace. All is well with the world.
But it turns out these suburbanites have been harboring a terrible secret. Locked up in their basement is Governor Olatka (Keith Kelly), a politician undergoing intense media scrutiny over allegations of sexual assault. (This character’s real-world analogs are depressingly rife, so take your pick of whom he’s supposed to represent.) The husband and wife have kidnapped him less for these allegations and more for their suspicions that he’s involved in a secret, underground cabal of child-abusing political elites. That’s right, Carol and Gordon are basically pizzagaters. The aliens, needless to say, are at a loss for what to do, especially when a group of fellow cultists calling themselves the “Order of the White Circle” come knocking, ready to post on social media a video of them beheading the governor. I won’t reveal where things go from there, but these scenes comprise Clark’s funniest (and most brazenly unsubtle) satirical swipes, one ongoing joke being just how difficult it is for our heroes to find host bodies belonging to people who aren’t total weirdos.
With its knowingly chintzy special effects and picaresque narrative tour through a wildly dysfunctional America, The Becomers is a sort-of Midwestern counterpart to Sean Price Williams’ The Sweet East (2023). And while Clark may lack Williams’ visual sophistication, he also lacks the self-satisfied smugness that sucked much of the life from Nick Pinkerton’s script for that film. So it’s a bit of a tradeoff. In true Midwestern fashion, Clark’s movie is much friendlier than its thematic twin (this despite the fact that it features a newborn baby being tossed in a trash fire). Together, these films would make for a good “American life in the 2020s sure was strange, wasn’t it?”-themed double feature some twenty years from now. Future midnight movie curators, take note.
The Becomers is far from great satire, and it takes a while to find its groove, but it’s further proof that Clark is willing to take big swings, budget and taste be damned. I’m also pleased to announce that the writer-director ends the proceedings on an upbeat(ish) note: “While our planet died around us,” Mael narrates, “there was a love that saw us through.” Oddly enough, the closing image of more fork-shaped ships descending to Earth feels reassuring rather than nihilistic. One can only hope our new alien overlords make a better go of it than we did.
Thomas M. Puhr lives in Chicago, where he teaches English and language arts. A regular contributor to Bright Lights Film Journal, he has published Fate in Film: A Deterministic Approach to Cinema with Wallflower Press.