When you put two characters in a car together and make them travel across the country, it’s pretty much guaranteed that Things Will Happen. And things will definitely happen when one of the characters is a little person with a sullen attitude and the other is a spunky woman who believes she was abducted by aliens when she was a teenager. This is the basic premise of director Juan Felipe Zuleta’s film Unidentified Objects, a film that takes on the age-old road trip buddy movie trope and tries to elevate it to new heights with the addition of some good old-fashioned extraterrestrial spunk.
Peter (Matthew Jeffers) is a gay little person who lives alone and is struggling to move on from some unresolved trauma in his life when he is unexpectedly heckled by his neighbor Winona (Sarah Hay), a sex worker who begs him to borrow his car so she can drive to an undisclosed location in Canada and be reunited with the aliens that visited her years ago. Because this is a movie, Peter agrees to loan her his hot pink vehicle (even though she doesn’t have a driver’s license and seems, frankly, unhinged) under the sole condition that he gets to tag along for the ride. Naturally, she says yes, and what follows is nearly two hours of a Garden State-esque quirky journey in which the friends made along the way are more important than the final destination. Obviously, any seasoned film buff will be able to spot the twists and turns of Unidentified Objects from miles away, but the chemistry between Jeffers and Hay is electric enough that it will keep you tuned in for a lot longer than you might initially expect.
Hay is convincing as a sort of woke, manic pixie dream girl who truly believes that aliens will be waiting for her if she manages to make it to her destination in time, but Jeffers is the true star of the film, vacillating between a jaded recluse and an insecure introvert who desperately wants to belong and feel accepted in the world. He dazzles on screen as he slowly begins to open up to and trust Winona, and while Winona’s purpose is the reason for the duo’s journey, it is Peter who audiences will come to care about the most. Still, as dynamic as these two actors are together, Unidentified Objects never really elevates itself beyond the standard buddy road trip film.
Sure, aliens are involved — in many ways the movie plays out like a slightly more idiosyncratic version of Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind — but the film frequently feels rushed and unnecessarily clichéd despite its atypical premise. Because of this, it’s hard to really love it for anything more than just your average good time. It’s true that it’s heartwarming in all the right places, but it ultimately only manages to stay in its lane, never really breaking out of its own orbit in order to explore other galaxies. Watch it if you’re looking for a feel-good movie about friendship and acceptance, but just don’t expect any planetary revelations.
Photo courtesy of Quiver Distribution
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