Two women form an uneasy bond as 'visitors' patrol the night skies.


VISITORS is used with permission from Alex Badham. Learn more at https://visitors.film.


The world has changed: penguins wander in the Australian outback; dead squids lie stranded on remote dirt roads; sharks swim in abandoned swimming pools. Amidst the eerieness, two women who are strangers to one another, without even a common language, find themselves sharing a country home.

As the hours pass, they start to form an uneasy bond. But the presence of nighttime "visitors" who patrol the skies at night threatens what fragile peace and understanding they come to.

Directed by Alex Badham from a script written by Anna Snoekstra, this enigmatic short sci-fi drama explores the human need for connection, even when facing the most challenging circumstances. Though the two women of the story do not know one another and don't even share a common language, the film tenderly chronicles the development of their bond, even as they contend with a series of elusive, powerful alien-like presences that can transport them anywhere in the world.

Much of the film's power comes from its juxtaposition of genuine human interactions and unsettling atmosphere, created in part by the delicate precision of its odd, almost surreal images and the washes of electronic tones that form the score. Within this strange, oddly isolating world, Alison and Li have managed to band together. The writing is spare and we get a few background details of how each character has arrived at their common location, but it's evocative enough to detail a strange phenomenon that finds people taken "up" and then dropped elsewhere, far from everything they know.

The storytelling is a slow burn, quiet at first, but gaining momentum as the two women pass the time together, even as the nighttime patrols escalate. Small details -- rendered with restrained use of special effects -- hint at the patrols' capabilities, but they're played for intrigue and mystery, not propulsive thrills. Instead, the focus is on Alison and Li, and how they find ways to connect despite their lack of commonalities. Actors Maggie Madfox and Cait Spiker balance between initial wariness to genuine friendship. But just when they seem to truly connect, the strange visitors assert their power.

Fascinating and mysterious, VISITORS is ripe for expansion, its unanswered questions intriguing enough to be developed in a larger format. The story is part of a wave of cerebral sci-fi exploring an altered world, where the patterns, habitats and nature we once knew no longer appears or works as they used to. The environment is not only changing in unpredictable ways, but those rapid, unsettling changes also create a widening scale of human displacement. With Alison and Li, there's a fragile hope that we still find a way to connect to others and assuage our feelings of aloneness within this radically shifting landscape. These human bonds are persistent, formed even in the most uncertain of circumstances -- though by the film's end, we wonder if they can transcend the huge forces resculpting the world before our eyes.