‘You continue to play this alien part, and I’m fucking over it – I’ve had enough.” On that note, uptight boyfriend Shannon (Will Tranfo) kicks the woman he thought was his girlfriend out of the car – and perhaps echoes the audience’s thoughts about this grindingly zany indie sci-fi comedy. And that’s only 10 minutes into Brando Topp’s directing debut, in which Mika (Mia Danelle) is rocking out to gnarly sounds on her headphones when her body is hijacked by an alien soundwave that was formerly stuck in space listening to the vibrations coming from Earth.
That Alien, Sound plays out like a lo-fi LA sweding of The Man Who Fell to Earth. Stupefied at having a body, the wave – later dubbed Sound – bugs Shannon by chucking tissues around the car and trying to grab the steering wheel. Back at her bewildered parents’ house, she marvels at the five senses and, excited by a fried breakfast, burns herself on the pan. Her brother Deyo (Deyo Forteza) takes her to his band’s jam session; a chance for the once-disembodied oscillation to be in the presence of real live music.
This cosmic body-swap scenario is infuriatingly loose, with no obvious reason for the soundwave gimmick other than the innate kookiness. Self-infatuated scenes sprawl out for too long with all the discipline of an Echo Park hipster improv group after a long night on the edibles. Sound, indignant at what she finds on terra firma, is increasingly gripped by outraged soliloquies about climate change and human megalomania; these are the kind of trite interventions that give wokeness a bad name.
But matters do pick up in the film’s final phase, as Sound, Shannon and Deyo head to a music festival to make a radio transmission that they hope will bring Mika back. As the story coalesces around her and Shannon’s failing relationship, the alien conceit starts to make more sense in terms of a strangeness in his partner he feels threatened by, and the new identity she is seeking. Even some of the heavy quirk – turning up at the jamboree cosplaying as Mozart – starts to seem charming as Topp’s directing locks into place around actual themes. It goes to show: inside every annoyingly tricksy indie comedy is a decent road movie trying to get out.
• That Alien, Sound is on digital platforms from 18 August.
