They're Here
2022 · 13m
Directed by Sid Zanforlin
Genres: coming-of-age, drama, sci-fi
Tones: dark, tender, whimsical
A twelve-year-old girl becomes convinced her catatonic grandmother has been invaded by an alien and will stop at nothing to prove it.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The alien-invasion-as-metaphor-for-grief angle is obvious enough that it threatens to collapse into sentimentality, but Zanforlin refuses the easy catharsis—the girl's obsession stays genuinely unresolved, which is the only interesting move here.
A formally assured piece that knows exactly how to modulate between magical realism and intimate family drama, positioning itself squarely in the lineage of contemporary European coming-of-age cinema without pastiche.
The entire film lives or dies on the decision to keep the grandmother's perspective opaque—never confirming or denying the invasion—and that refusal to resolve the ambiguity into either sci-fi spectacle or pure metaphor is what makes the relationship between these two actually breathe.