The Gracefield Incident (2017)

(In French, On TV, October 2021) My decision to watch The Gracefield Incident was as impulsive as it was intended to be ironic: You see, there’s a small town a hundred kilometres north of where I live that is named Gracefield. Since it’s not known for anything but its cottages, seeing a no-name low-budget science-fiction film titled the same was enough to amuse me. Frankly, I expected some New England-set cheapo alien horror that would refer to a Gracefield that clearly wasn’t the local Gracefield. I stopped smiling thirty seconds after the film began, the moment I noticed that the characters were obviously driving through Montréal. My lack of amusement turned to astonishment a few minutes later, once it became obvious that the characters were headed to a cottage in the local Gracefield. That aside, this very-small-budget film, written-directed-produced-edited-headlined by Matthew Ratthe, has more trouble distinguishing itself. The special effects are better than you’d expect, and the ending is surprisingly better than the usual horror nihilism that comes out of similar films. I’m going to go soft on the rest—this is clearly the kind of small-scale film whose very existence itself is a half-miracle. Anything else is a bonus. So, I’m not happy to report that The Gracefield Incident is a found-footage film with many of the usual issues and exasperation of the subgenre: impossible camera logic, dubious motivations, slap-dash dramatic scenes, exasperating shakycam, deliberately obscured action… all the same annoyances that movie reviewers have spent the last twenty-some years cataloguing. To that we can add a significant amount of blandness in the execution: uninteresting characters, an alien menace that seems to be getting its kicks out of juvenile pranks, and some serious pacing issues in the middle of a film where the characters are getting yanked out of frame regularly. But there’s a reason why such flaws are common in low-budget pictures, and they have to do with shooting a feature film in a short time with no significant budget. As such, I’m perhaps more sympathetic to an almost-local production: they’ve made a movie, that’s cool. I do wish the cleverness would have translated to the rougher spots of the script, but that’s asking for more. I’ll note that I saw the film in French, meaning that I didn’t experience the bad ADR noted in many reviews of the original English dub—but the French dub inexplicably translates the material in mid-Atlantic French, whereas this cried out for pure thick Québécois dialogue. Ah well—The Gracefield Incident is certainly not a great film, but it’s better than many, many of its found-footage alien-abduction equivalents. Plus, hey: who would have ever thought that Gracefield, of all places, would have its own titled science-fiction movie?