A gripping survival thriller with a cosmic horror edge, testing one woman’s resolve to fight against the very idea of death, as she treks through the Georgian Caucasus with nothing but a Weird Rock in her pocket and a mysterious voice on her radio.
★★★½
Hugo Keijzer’s debut feature, The Occupant, is a compelling survival thriller with a streak of cosmic sci-fi horror. British geologist Abby Brennan (Ella Balinska) is consumed by the need to save her terminally ill sister, Beth. Despite the clear fault lines forming in her relationships, Abby refuses to let go, choosing instead to embark on a perilous search for uranium on the Russian-Georgian border, hoping the financial yield will pay for her sister’s experimental treatment.
Chancing upon a strange black rock that maintains the steady temperature of the human body, Abby tries to head back home to sell it. But when a helicopter crash leaves her stranded in the harsh, glacial wilderness of the Georgian Caucasus, she makes radio contact with a similarly stranded American pilot, John (voiced by Rob Delaney). Abby sets out alone across the snowy terrain, her single-mindedness to locate John – and use his equipment to call for help – as unyielding as the limestone mountains, even as the world around her becomes increasingly unstable.
The film’s sweeping cinematography frames Abby as a small figure dwarfed by rock and ice, a reminder of the ancient forces that shape both landscape and human fate. Her increasingly perilous journey causes a kind of seismic shift—cracking open the emotional bedrock she has tried so hard to keep frozen solid. By the time the landscape seems in danger of swallowing her up completely, it’s clear that Abby’s journey may not just take her across the border into the Russian-controlled “occupied zone”, but across the border from life into the eternal.
Ella Balinska effectively carries the whole of The Occupant on her shoulders. Shot on location in a harsh unforgiving environment, it puts both character and actor through the wringer; she deserves plaudits for taking on a role where she looks like she genuinely might be developing frostbite, and could snap an ankle at any moment as she strides uncertainly across mountainsides strewn with an unforgiving rubble of loose, shifting slate.
A streak of the fantastical is nicely handled – there’s clearly going to be more to both the jet-black rock and the stranded American than meets the eye – and the ending delivers a pleasing hint of the eternal – or something like it.
Keijzer’s stark and immersive vision transforms Abby’s survival quest into a psychological odyssey—a tale of one woman’s struggle to fight against the dying of the light. Blinding white vistas, and Tarkovskian shots of pure waters trickling over implacable grey stone, make it clear that this is some kind of purgatorial gauntlet. The landscape around her has been forged by the glacial dynamics of geological epochs. But by the time she reaches the edge of the eternal, Abby’s survival may depend on seismic shifts happening not within the Earth, but within her own heart.
The Occupant debuted at SXSW London, and will be coming to UK cinemas later this year.
Whitlock&Pope 