Once dismissed as cheap schlock for drive-ins and children’s matinees, alien films have long soared into the budgetary stratosphere, reveling in VFX scares and wonder.
Yoshiki Matsumoto’s debut feature “Alien’s Daydream” – which won two awards at last year’s Skip City International D-Cinema Festival, including Best Picture – proves that it’s still possible to create a fresh, entertaining take on the genre on a small budget. to deliver. And he does so without resorting to genre parody, the usual subterfuge of Japanese indie sci-fi filmmakers who put everything from clunky action to bad acting in quotes.
This isn’t to say the film is humorless: it’s written, directed and edited by Matsumoto, and it looks at the more ridiculous aspects of the story, from a cheap UFO museum to its green alien mascot, with its tongue firmly in cheek. But it is also an ambitious, multi-layered essay on the UFO phenomenon, with a story that is startlingly ambiguous and shot in a style that is wildly imaginative. Meanwhile, the film exposes the corruption of the tabloid media, for which UFO sightings and alien abductions are convenient fictions to boost sales.
