UNIDENTIFIED OBJECTS

JUAN FELIPE ZULETA | USA | 2022 | 100 MIN | ENGLISH

Winona was fifteen when they took her. In three days, they’re coming again – to Canada. Enough time to steal a car to reach the abduction site. Though that car comes with one major, sharp-tongued condition: Peter, a down-on-his-luck misanthrope with his own reasons for sneaking into the Great White North.

Peter (New Amsterdam’s Matthew August Jeffers) calls himself, in withering self-description, a “college-educated homosexual dwarf.” A triple outsider turned curmudgeonly by life’s hard knocks. It takes Winona (Golden Globe-nominated Sarah Hay) – a redheaded sex worker waxing poetic about the “advanced, harmonious species” heading their way – to shake Peter out of his doldrums. Together, they confront the disappointments of our shared space rock, experiencing epiphanies, like little cosmic explosions, along the way. Unidentified Objects is out of this world, a tragicomic gem populated by Chekhovian characters whose lives represent real, raw stakes. The film pays off on its paranormal premise, injecting wild originality into the road trip genre, with something to enthral or enchant in every scene, every frame: a vista, a crackling joke, a sneakily gut-punching monologue about life’s beautiful, broken promise. 

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