Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Encounter’ on Amazon Prime, a Wild Mush of Genres and Ideas (and Bugs), Starring the Inimitable Riz Ahmed

Amazon Prime’s Encounter is noteworthy for being the second directorial feature from promising newcomer Michael Pearce (2017’s Beast), and for showcasing the considerable talents of Riz Ahmed, who should’ve won the best actor Oscar for Sound of Metal. It’s a genre bender with elements of sci-fi, thrillers, family melodrama, road-trip and action movies – which means it’s either going to be a smooth cruise or a bumpy ride.

ENCOUNTER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: SPACE. An object hurtles through the solar system, cuts through Earth’s atmosphere and streaks across the Western U.S. sky with a thundering sonic boom. THE WOODS, where we presume the space object crashed, and where we know many, many insects dwell. Insects that eat each other with their squiggly little mandibles. They’re everywhere, insects. Like this mosquito, which buzzes through the dark and lands on a human arm, where it inserts its proboscis into human skin to suck human blood – maybe, but not this time! Out of its wormy little probe shoots a tiny organism that looks like a cross between a pill bug and a tardigrade, which works its way through the bloodstream, then bursts apart into a zillion little squiggles, surely infecting this poor human being with god knows what.

At this point, entomophobes may feel the urge to tune out, but they should know that the rest of the movie is about two young boys and their estranged father. The latter is Malik Khan (Ahmed), who we meet in a grungy motel room. He gets out of bed, douses himself with bug spray, smashes the glop out of a wasp that’s living (presumably with a bunch of its pals) behind the wallpaper, then heads out. Elsewhere, his sons Jay (Lucian-River Chauhan), who’s maybe 10, and Bobby (Aditya Geddada) live with their mom, Piya (Janina Gavankar), and nice-guy stepdad Dylan (Misha Collins). There’s a moment where Piya is bit on the back of the neck by some unidentified bug and a little blood trickles out and nobody thinks anything of it, nor should they, unless they saw the opening sequence of the movie, like we did, so we wonder if she’s doomed or what.

Malik has been AWOL from his family for about two years now. He’s a decorated former Special Forces Marine who experienced probably too many tours, and also did some time in military prison. Jay wakes up in the wee hours to find his dad next to him. Malik shines a flashlight in Jay and Bobby’s eyes, just to make sure. Make sure of what? That they’re not infected, I guess. Malik says they have to go on a special mission together. But what about mom and the nice-guy stepdad? They’ve been taken over by microscopic aliens, Malik says, so they have to get outta there, and their mission is to do secret military things about those aliens. They’re tooling along the road in the middle of the night when they’re pulled over. Malik has a pistol in his belt, which leads to an altercation with the cop. Actually, we see the cop has something screwy going on with his eyes, so that also leads to the altercation. And now Malik and the boys are really on the run, but from who? Authorities? Mom and the nice-guy stepdad? Infectypants micromonsters from the moon? NO SPOILIN’ IT.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Pearce’s desire to mix tried-and-true genre fodder into something relatively fresh brings to mind Jeff Nichols’ films – think Take Shelter or Midnight Special. One scene recalls Men in Black, but, like, a serious version; others stirred memories of Bug, which is one of (many!) Michael Shannon-loses-his-shit movies.

Performance Worth Watching: Ahmed brings such enthusiasm to his performance, he almost smooths out the film’s mildly egregious plotting issues. Also, don’t overlook Chauhan, who doesn’t fall into the precocity traps like many child actors, and carries some considerable dramatic weight in several exchanges with Ahmed.

Memorable Dialogue: Brothers bantering:

Bobby: Aliens like Pop Tarts?

Jay: Everyone likes Pop Tarts, Bobby.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Encounter is such a mixed bag, it makes one want to type up a Rory Gilmore pro/con list. I’ll spare you the Type-A listing and charting, and just say, when the film works, it’s memorable and intriguing, and when it doesn’t, it’s deflating. Co-writing with Joe Barton, Pearce shows scads of ambition, but not enough focus, the biggest issue being point-of-view. I tread carefully, because the film wants us to continually question the nature of its reality, and by extension, what type of film it really is. This is a long way of saying it’s a twisty plot, and while I’m happy to say it’s far more subtle than the Shyamalan hairpin-turn variety, the truth is, it’s a narrative cheat, making us think one thing then pulling the rug out from under us. The movie starts out pretty nutty – ew, bugs! – and gets increasingly conventional as it progresses.

Pearce covers a whole lotta topical fodder: Mental health and PTSD; COVID-era infection metaphors; Trump-era socio-political yada yada, including paranoid conspiracies and white-supremacist groups; guns, and whether pointing them at a person, even if he’s perceived as dangerous, is the right thing to do; the eternal debate about the culinary virtues of Pop Tarts (my take: they’re gross). A few of Pearce’s ancillary characters wear the logo of real-life anti-government militia Three Percenters – some of them rioted at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 – and one of them is rather trigger-happy and not entirely competent with a machine gun. That’s definitely a choice Pearce made; the intent remains foggy, as if he isn’t sure whether to make a statement or simply be provocative. It’s too tonally pinched to be a B-movie with edgy satirical comedy stirred into the thrills, but too out there to be taken seriously.

So maybe Encounter, as it tries to do and say so much, ends up not doing or saying much. Push past the question of whether Malik’s paranoia is justified; past the philosophical justification of urbanites fearing bugs because they aren’t fuzzy and cuddly; past the underuse of a talent like Octavia Spencer, who’s hired to be a calming voice amidst the sneering, gung-ho overconfidence of male authority – oh god, the SUBJECT MATTER, it’s EVERYWHERE. Anyway. Push past all the stuff and you can’t help but feel conflicted about the movie, with its terrific Ahmed performance – the father-son stuff he initiates feels so terrifically authentic – and inspired visual acumen, with its tense and unpleasant melodrama and its dream/hallucination red herrings. It’s all over the road.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Bottom line: Good filmmaking, better performances, mediocre writing. Gird your expectations.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

Stream Encounter on Amazon Prime