Some movies, especially more modern takes on humanity, are rather mystifying to me.  I struggle to understand why certain characters behave the way they do, why I am supposed to care, and sometimes even why a particular story was given the green light to proceed.  Why does this movie even exist?  That, of course, is the wonder of the business: every movie, no matter how wonderful or confounding, has a place.  Every movie is made by a team of people devoted to bringing it to life, and I suspect that every movie, no matter how wretched, is the favorite of someone, somewhere.  And it was only later, hours after watching this wacky little independent feature, that I found a hook that has made me think about it in a much larger perspective.

Juan Felipe Zuleta’s movie finds sex worker Winona (Sarah Hay) desperate to travel to the Canadian wilderness, offering her uptight neighbor Peter (Matthew Jeffers) $1700 to drive her there.  Their road trip takes a few days, uncovers a great deal of personality and closely-held secrets, covers some odd encounters and culminates in what Winona hopes will be her long-awaited second alien abduction.  Yes, it is a weird, odd story.

It was the sex worker angle that drew me to watch it; I wondered how this would play and how sexual the story would become.  The answer is, not at all.  Her work is barely mentioned and certainly not demonstrated.  Okay, it’s a character piece.  Only we don’t really get to know Winona; she is who she already is.  The story’s focus is on Peter, the lonely, bitter neighbor, a gay man with dwarfism with a lot of bills to pay and no romantic prospects.  The trip changes him, irrevocably, and hopefully for the better.  That’s the gist of the movie and it is well played; it’s just not at all what I was expecting.  The ending is also hopeful but ambiguous in terms of Winona’s future — and that seems like the right call.  Plus, the budget probably couldn’t have handled any special effects sequences.

So this is an odd little movie about people looking for more meaning than life is offering them.  Okay, two stars, I guess.  And then, later at night I happened to realize that this could have been the movie that I was expecting when I first saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind was back in 1977, my favorite movie of all time.  Except, that back in 1977, I was actually disappointed in it the first time I saw it.  Let me explain.

Steven Spielberg’s vision of “first contact” is a wild story of obsession for the lucky (or unlucky, depending on one’s perspective) people touched by the alien invitation to meet at Devil’s Tower.  For the first half, I was entranced by this wonderful opportunity as Roy Neary and Gillian Guiler head for their destinies.  But I had trouble with all the military references that were piling up — the Piggly Wiggly trucks with mysterious equipment and the French guy investigating everything about the aliens.  My own vision for Close Encounters was that the obsessed people, thirty or forty or fifty of them, would meet the aliens at the Tower and discover . . . whatever wonders Steven Spielberg could devise.  Perhaps that was naïve.  Perhaps he had the same vision but couldn’t make it work.  He eventually decided, or settled, to have a mix of scientific and military types meet the aliens for “first contact,” and I long ago resolved myself to agree that that was the correct decision.  And yet . . .

Unidentified Objects in its own way is the civilian version of this story.  Only one person is obsessed, and Winona is excited to meet the aliens at their request.  She already knows them, evidently, and has been awaiting a return visit.  At the end of the story she encounters others with what must be a shared vision, if not obsession, and they also seem ready and willing to meet the aliens in the Canadian wilderness.  This scenario, kinda sorta, is what I had pictured for the Close Encounters climax — only it isn’t here in this mildly penetrating character study.  The end was never the point.  Like any good road trip movie, the journey itself is the destination.  That’s fine, and this film is probably proof that my own vision for Close Encounters would not have worked.  I find it rather wild and exhilarating that I made this mental connection between these two movies, and I may be the only one to ever do so.  That’s part of the amazing power of film: connections like this, or on a more personal level, can be made to anyone at anytime for any kind of reason, if one is open to them.  So I’ve decided to give Unidentified Objects the same rating as I gave Close Encounters the first time I saw it, since this movie is kinda sorta close to what I had expected to see way back then.  ☆ ☆ 1/2.  25 April 2025.