Alienated
2011 · 16m · Australia , España
Directed by Gerard Mates
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, darkly comic
A couple who have lived on a farm and been married for more than forty years see their relationship falter because of a flying saucer placed in their backyard.
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A flying saucer as a marriage counselor—the premise alone is audacious enough to make you squint, but Mates commits to the bit with such deadpan sincerity that the absurdity becomes genuinely unsettling, turning forty years of intimacy into a Kafkaesque standoff with the inexplicable.
The film operates within a lineage of rural American gothic that recalls both Haneke's formal restraint and the quiet dread of mid-century sci-fi, using the intrusion as a structuring device that forces examination of how we frame domestic rupture through genre conventions.
The restraint in not explaining the saucer—letting it simply sit there as a fact the couple must negotiate around—is the decision that transforms what could've been a gimmick into something genuinely destabilizing about how we externalize marital failure.