Homecoming
2023 · 10m · USA
Directed by Garrett Johnson, Ben Nicholson
Tones: dark, melancholic, tense
One year after her son Josh vanishes, Rachel Strayer's life falls apart while her ex-husband moves on. During her first night alone, Rachel encounters unexpected visitors who reveal a shocking truth about Josh's fate.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most filmmakers would've played this as either grief-porn or alien-invasion schlock, but Johnson and Nicholson refuse the comfort of either lane—they're using the extraterrestrial encounter as a metaphor for the unbearable unknowability of loss, which is genuinely subversive in a landscape of either/or genre thinking.
The film's formal restraint—holding the cosmic horror in tight domestic frames, letting the uncanny emerge through sound design and negative space rather than spectacle—situates it in a lineage of psychological sci-fi that prizes suggestion over exposition, though the tonal fusion occasionally threatens to fracture under its own ambition.
The crucial move here is the sound design in the third act: the way the otherworldly frequencies layer beneath Rachel's breathing, collapsing the boundary between external threat and internal rupture, which transforms what could've been a conventional encounter narrative into something about how grief rewires your nervous system.
Reviews
Maybe all couples' problems would be resolved if they came into contact with a monster of extraterrestrial origin.
Directors Garrett Johnson and Ben Nicholson sought to combine cosmic horror with a gut-wrenching tale of parental grief and loss.
Festivals
- Atlanta Horror Film Festival 2023
- Sherman Oaks Film Festival 2023