J Paul Johnson
A funny, squicky, and surprisingly poignant body-horror sci-fi romance-dramedy from the apparently kinda warped mind of Zach Clark, The Becomers follows up its Fantasia Fest debut with a theatrical rollout beginning this week. Just like the slow-moving, sometimes errant alien invasion it depicts, its modest charms sneak up on unsuspecting viewers. Drawing inspiration from the original Star Trek series, the Invasions of the Body Snatchers films, and Cronenbergian sex/body horror with a mix of simple practical visual effects, Clark mixes up a frothy, funny take on the paranoiac politics of our Covid-era condition.
The Becomers began during Covid and bears the hallmarks of many a pandemic production: shooting in fits and starts on a micro-budget, limited sets and simple effects, masks and distancing and other visible preventative measures—and above all, a cheeky inventiveness borne of necessity. Like the best science fiction films, so often set in a not-too-distant future, The Becomers not only presents a peculiar, particular problem but also uses its setting, characters, and narrative to comment on the world we inhabit right here and now.
The narrative begins with the deadpan intonation, a la some weird sci-fi film noir, via Sparks’ Russell Mael, telling the story of a love between two aliens, landed from the skies on a strange world called Earth: “I remember how pretty and pale they looked, standing in the sulphur rain.” The story follows the that alien’s lover, weary and famished from the journey, needing a host: it first consumes a hunter, then a pregnant woman named Francesca (Isabel Alamin), whom it finds giving birth, alone, in the backseat of a car parked on an isolated road. In these early moments, Clark plays it straight, as if all the film has in store is a slightly quirky take on a run-of-the-mill invasion tale.
Alien Francesca needs cover and sustenance too, so she dons sunglasses to cover her now-glowing eyes and checks in to a local motel. There, the clerk (Frank V. Ross) is—despite learning Francesca disposed of the (just-born but now-unnecessary to an alien) baby in a trash can—smitten, soon declaring his weirdo love for her. It’s an awkward scene, the kind that reminds you why women choose the bear. But Francesca has a more important quest to fulfill: somewhere on Earth, her alien lover is waiting in another guise, also invading and assuming humans’ bodies as necessary, and Francesca needs to find him (or her, or them—gender is cleverly perfectly fluid in the aliens save for whichever human-sexed body they adopt or perhaps for the color of their glowing pink or blue eyes).
Francesca soon takes over another human body, named Carol (Molly Plunk, who starred in Clark’s Little Sister), who had been embroiled alongside her husband (Mike Lopez of All Jacked Up and Full of Worms), in a cult-conspiracy abduction of the state of Illinois’ governor (played by Kelly Clark): it’s a complex and deeply weird set of religion and politics intersecting in ways no alien being could hope to fathom, much less deftly navigate. And those circumstances, to all of us who lived through (and remember, not all did) Covid, are all too real: kidnappings of authority figures, rampant disinformation, secret societies and meetings, arcane rituals, all of that is what we just lived through.
Along the way, Clark lets loose with lots of humor, much of it emanating from alien-Carol’s awkward attempts to pass in the guise of a normal human enmeshed in an idiotic conspiracy plot. Plunk is a delight, using her physical comedy skills—all dorky looks and gangly elbows—to her advantage; so too is Kelly, a pompous blowhard of a governor forced to tell some uncomfortable truths when the conspiracy plot finally falls apart. One is never quite sure where exactly Clark is going, and the film traverses genres as easily as the aliens traverse human bodies, but even as the two alien lovers’ reunion is celebrated with some surely-squicky Cronenbergian crevice probing, The Becomers‘ ultimate destination finally becomes clear.
Don Siegel’s original Invasion of the Body Snatchers appeared at the heights of McCarthyism in 1956 and worked as an allegory for our neighbors supposedly being something other than how they appeared, demonizing Communist sympathizers as unhuman. The 1978 remake by Philip Kaufman followed the twin follies of Watergate and Vietnam, when Americans’ distrust in its government and other institutions reached, for then if not now, its nadir: its aliens were denoted by their absolute lack of empathy. Clark’s follows those films’ castigation of “the other” as un- or sub-human, save for that the joke here is by now, in a twenty-first century riddled by the novel Coronavirus-19 and all of the attendant conspiracy-theorizing and disinformation it brought out into the light, that it’s the humans who are so often and so sadly less than human.
Or maybe that’s not a joke per se, but simply an insight. And one worth observing, at that. Clark’s aliens, intelligent and empathic if unversed in the ways of humanity, have the potential to provide a much-needed reminder of what it means to be human: to love, to understand, to accept. In that way, the “Becomers” here are a good deal human than many of us.
