Shot in the Chicago area, the film throws you into the middle of its plot and immediately makes it clear that this is a science fiction film that explores its ideas primarily from the point of view of aliens rather than the people who encounter them. The main characters are two lovers from a dying world who came here separately to reunite and make a fresh start, and after some complications, end up back together and living an outwardly typical American suburban lifestyle. The aliens are played by various actors, in the manner of a science fiction or horror film where creatures or spirits pass from one host to another. The main cast includes Isabel Alamin, Molly Plunk, Victoria Misu and Mike Lopez, and the story is occasionally narrated by Russell Mael in a not entirely monotone, sometimes slyly comic manner.
Everyone is on point in terms of a consistent way of portraying themselves. The visitors are expressionless, quietly introspective when interacting with humans, but still super alert and a bit too cheerful-cheerful or too preoccupied with what they’ve learned about human life and how they’ve been chosen to portray or mirror our behavior. There’s a strangely touching shot of a “male” and “female” alien couple lying on a sofa together watching TV, and the woman stretches out her long leg and touches the man with her foot; it’s an unconscious parody of the way humans who are physically intimate with each other express this through casual touches. People who interact with aliens in human skin know something is “off” but can’t figure out what it is. There’s also a shot of a character eating snacks from a can with a spoon, and that might make you think about what it means to eat something from a can with a spoon.
Disguises are necessary. The original form of an inhabited human body has glowing fuchsia eyes. Special contact lenses are required to cover these. The anatomy of the creatures beneath the human skin can be seen but is not fully shown. These visitors play us very well and anything that is “wrong” can be put down to them being people who are a little bit odd. Since everyone is a little bit odd once you get to know them, they can get away with a lot.
For whatever reason, they’ve ended up in the suburbs, and not the kind of suburbs in “American Beauty” or “The Graduate,” where expensive yuppies drive fancy cars and reflect on the empty materialism of their lives. This is a more, er, earthy kind of suburb. The car culture is unchallenged. People shop at convenience stores and discount clothing stores. Something about the way Clark and cinematographer Darryl Pittman shoot their real-life locations, including a run-of-the-mill motel and a run-of-the-mill suburban home, brings up another interesting aspect of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho: the way the film captures what the United States looked like in the mid-20th century, when the interstate highway system was built, many smaller towns were bypassed and forgotten and cut off from prosperity, and the “freedom” of the open road turned to fear and despair when running away from something rather than toward it.
