The charming and visually inventive Unidentified Objects is the rarest of things: a science-fiction-tinged road movie about two misfits travelling towards an alien abduction site, which also features a rare leading role about a queer little person. The lo-fi comedy-drama is a promising feature-length debut from director Juan Felipe Zuleta, with one foot firmly in a hard-bitten realism and the other in whimsical flights of fantasy. It’s a precarious and delicate balancing act buoyed by the cast’s warm and generous performances.
Paul (Matthew Jeffers) is a cantankerous, unemployed, and debt-ridden gay dwarf whose permanent disgruntlement and self-isolation is interrupted by his neighbour Winona (Sarah Hay), a hyperactive and talkative sex worker who is the text-book definition of a cinematic free-spirit. Winona wants to borrow Paul’s car to travel from New York to rural Canada to reunite with the aliens from the Andromeda galaxy who she claims abducted her many years ago. Understandably, Paul is resistant to the idea, but persuaded by the offer of money and the opportunity to honour a promise made to a recently deceased friend — he agrees to come along for the ride.
Unidentified Objects leans both heavily into the cliches of the road movie genre while also pushing away from it. As the characters find themselves in a series of increasingly surreal encounters, this playful film starts to resemble a ramshackle take on The Wizard of Oz but instead of scarecrows, witches, and winged monkeys, they encounter stoner drifters, extraterrestrial police forces, and lesbian cosplayers. The boundaries between real life and fantasy become increasingly porous and hard to distinguish between. There are other indirect influences here, from Alex Cox’s Repo Man, Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien, and Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin — another queer road film about trauma and visions of extraterrestrial abductions. The anamorphic lensing gives the visuals a wide-screen, wide-eyed sense of wonder. Zuleta shot many of the scenes at blue hour, giving them a dreamlike and magical quality.
Peter carries around a collection of Chekov’s short stories and while the plot doesn’t have an obvious Chekhov’s Gun, his character does share the same tragedy and pessimism of Chekov’s protagonists. The characters are never judged for their personal shortcomings, partly due to Leland Frankel’s emphatic, teasingly ambiguous screenplay and the perfectly judged and emotionally wrought performances from Jeffers and Hays.
This is the first feature from the Colombian-born director, who developed the idea during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. The film can be seen as a response to the loneliness, frustration, and grief during this period. As is common in films about mismatched travel companions, the pair find out they have more in common than they initially thought and the dual meaning of the title comes into focus. These characters are outsiders who don’t easily fit in their own environments because they have been pushed aside by society due to social prejudices and discrimination, thus the film becomes an endearing paean to finding your own community.
Zuleta has a background directing pop music videos and for an independent film of a relatively small budget, Unidentified Objects is stylistically bold, full of moments of visual ingenuity and wit. The colour pink is used consistently to represent the idea of the alien being. The pink car that Paul and Sarah travel in becomes a character in itself, gliding through the landscape like a space shuttle, carrying them from one strange encounter to another. The score from the director’s brother, Sebastian Zuletas, moves from plaintiveness to whimsical alien sounds. It includes expertly placed needle drops from queer artist Perfume Genius, and most notably Roy Orbison, in a dreamy and erotically charged sequence between Peter and a mysterious man at a dive bar, adding to the surrealist atmosphere.
Unidentified Objects skillfully weaves dark comedy, vivid surrealism, and science-fiction elements with themes of grief, depression, and the discrimination felt by those on the fringes of society. It is a modest genre film with a wellspring of emotion and ideas that is deserving of wider attention. By the end we find ourselves rooting for both of these lonely, broken people.
