THE OCCUPANT (2025)

3 stars

Signature Entertainment. Digital. 1st September

Drone shot over wintery landscape. Zoom in on a cave. The camera glides into the blackness. An intriguing opening.

Cut to Abby (Ella Balinska, Charlie’s Angels) with her sister Beth (Vanessa Ifediora). They have recently lost their Mum it seems. Her sister is ill, dying in hospital. A foreign private clinic might offer a solution but it is expensive and may not have the same standards.

Abby is a geologist and in order to pay for the treatment she takes a job in the Georgian Caucasus on the Russian border – searching for nuclear material. Even her dad advises against it but she goes anyway.

Where they are searching there is a forested area – she somewhat recklessly decides to go into it, in the hope of finding something. There she discovers some black rock, which she takes back to study and realises it may be valuable. A phone call from her dad – it is only a matter of days.

She hops a helicopter ride heading to Tbilisi – the chopper is hit by something unknown and plummets down into the remote mountainous region below. She survives, unlike the two pilots, but has no operational radio and sets off to find a road she has identified 60 km south. Luckily she is quite resourceful but then, wouldn’t you know it, she gets a signal – an American, who identifies himself as John (Rob Delaney), who has also crash-landed and is injured. Wild coincidence or something more sinister?

Having worked out where he likely came down, she begins to traverse the difficult, inhospitable terrain. As it begins to rain heavily she hunkers down for the night – she checks out the strange lump of rock she found, which exhibits very odd properties. As she progresses John’s messages get slightly strange… About an hour in things take a turn for the weird… who is John? Is he real? What is the rock fragment really? Can she survive? What about that cave at the beginning?

Well directed by Hugo Keijzer feature directorial debut, this was taken from an original story Philip M Howe with the screenplay by Howe, Keijzer, Roelof Jan Minneboo and Xiao Tang. Keijzer and Howe made a short together in 2019 called The Occupant: Prologue, which presumably is connected to this in some way. Balinska carries the film, as it is mainly her on screen throughout, and she is excellent as the determined Abby. There is strong use of close up and wider shots of the striking landscape shot by cinematographer Robbie von Brussel.

Steve Kirkham