Vague Visages’  The Becomers review contains minor spoilers. Zach Clark’s 2024 movie features Russell Mael, Molly Plunk and Mike Lopez. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews.

Aliens looking to colonize Earth find themselves in the middle of a terrifying conspiracy in The Becomers, the latest charmingly low-budget offering from writer-director Zach Clark (Little Sister). As the film posits, maybe modern America is scarier than whatever exists out there in the cosmos? The main thread is a romance between two extraterrestrials who, sweetly, must find each other while hopping between different bodies. They do this by calling out into the night using a kind of whale song, even though their flashing eyes — an effect that’s a little dodgy but is typically covered by contacts, so the filmmakers don’t have to rely on it too much — should give them away easily. 

When the lovable duo first appears in The Becomers, they’re hopping from a lumberjack into a woman in labor, almost immediately disposing of her newborn afterwards in a move that thankfully doesn’t signal a transition into harsher territory recently covered by Caye Casas’ 2022 film The Coffee Table (IYKYK). Rather, The Becomers takes a while to find its footing, with much of the opening segments concerning the woman in question and a well-meaning motel employee who resembles a poor man’s Paul Dano and boasts a similarly nervy energy. If anything, a little more time spent with these two likable characters would’ve helped to better establish the central conceit, but Clark is clearly eager to get to the good stuff, and he rushes through things somewhat before settling into a groove.

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The ostensible leads are Carol (Molly Plunk) and Gordon (Mike Lopez), a middle-class suburban couple who seem like the perfect hosts for the star-crossed alien lovers. Unfortunately, they turn out to be anything but as a plot involving kidnapping the state governor with strong white supremacist undertones gradually reveals itself. XOF News (get it?) features prominently, especially early on when the female-presenting alien practices how to speak to other humans, so the satire isn’t exactly razor-sharp. But it works for the most part, especially since The Becomers was seemingly shot during the COVID-19 pandemic with virtually every character sporting a mask at some point. The reasons for targeting the governor appear to have something to do with a statewide mandate, though this is never made explicitly clear (the residents of Chicago, where the movie is set, reportedly took it well IRL). 

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The Becomers could thus be taken as a metaphor about the COVID-19 pandemic, given how the voiceover narration —  which is unnecessary and suggests a lack of confidence in the material, though Sparks’ Russell Mael does have a pleasant enough voice for it — details how a vicious virus ravaged the aliens’ homeland. Thus, The Becomers may be Clark’s way of ridiculing anti-vaxxers. He’s certainly targeting far-right loons at the very least, with the central cult, The White Circle, clearly meant to resemble virulent white nationalists. Indeed, one of the movie’s funniest moments finds the aliens refusing to remove their clothing for some kind of ritual, which is played as a sight gag and just further exemplifies how pathetic these hate-filled people really are, since even bloodthirsty monsters can’t understand them. 

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Likewise, later on, when the female-presenting alien jumps into the body of a Black woman, she learns a harsh lesson about race relations in America, suddenly finding herself unable to even hitch a ride with a stranger. Clark doesn’t venture too far down this particular path, but his decision to include such an observation at all makes the requisite impact. He’s aware it’s an issue, even if the writer-director isn’t quite sure how to tackle it in a movie that also features the most bizarre sex scene this side of Ali Abbasi’s 2018 film Border (which also boasts some truly disgusting prosthetics) and the birth of an alien baby that’s equal parts horrifying and adorable (great prosthetics too). The performances, meanwhile, veer wildly from naturalistic (Plunk and Lopez, who make for a winning duo) to the outlandish (one actor’s choices as a low-level cult-member are certainly, well, choices). 

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The score, from composer Fritz Myers (who also handled the music for Little Sister), is little more than a collection of loud noises, frequently sounding a bit like someone banging trash can lids together, but it crucially isn’t overused. With The Becomers, Clark frequently barrels all the way to the edge of the line but rarely puts anything more than a toe across it. Even when telling an outlandish story about extraterrestrial paramours finding each other across the vast expanse of North America, the writer-director keeps things resolutely grounded and human. The biggest surprise of The Becomers, a movie that opens with someone putting on a pair of sunglasses upside down and then stumbling forward to murder a laboring woman in a car in cold blood, is that it’s oddly sweet, and genuinely sells the idea that these two crazy (alien) kids belong together.

The Becomers released digitally on September 24, 2024.

Joey Keogh (@JoeyLDG) is a writer from Dublin, Ireland with an unhealthy appetite for horror movies and Judge Judy. In stark contrast with every other Irish person ever, she’s straight edge. Hello to Jason Isaacs.

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