“The Occupant” is a strangely frustrating movie. It stays engaging through the sheer force of a committed performance that anchors every single scene of the film, but it’s also so hard to get your arms around narratively (or even thematically) that it pushes you away.
“Run Sweetheart Run” star Ella Balinska, who I believe is in every single scene of Hugo Keijzer’s film, plays Abby, whose sister Beth is dying of cancer. Refusing to go along with her father’s advice to plan for the end of her sister’s life, Abby takes a crazy job to raise the funds for an experimental treatment: working at a uranium mine in Northern Georgia (the country, not the state). One of Keijzer’s errors is that we don’t spend enough time with Abby at home or even at the mine before he pivots to a tale of survival, meaning we only really know this character through glimpses of emotional flashbacks and the immediate situation she’s trying to overcome. And she’ll be forced to overcome a lot when the helicopter taking her out of this frozen tundra crashes, leaving her alone in a barren stretch of Eastern Europe.
Abby is lucky enough to find a radio, which allows her to contact what seems like an ally—a man who calls himself John (Rob Delaney, who was so great recently in “Dying For Sex”). He is also stranded a few miles over the icy terrain, and she’s convinced that they could help each other if she can reach him. From their very first interactions, something seems off about John, forcing viewers to question his motives and what’s even happening to Abby in the first place. And I haven’t even mentioned the magic rock that Abby finds that pivots “The Occupant” into sci-fi territory. Is Abby dead? Did she ever even go to Georgia? Is John real? Wait, why should I care?
The last question is the one that evades Keijzer despite Balinska’s best efforts. She’s legitimately great, making a film that could have been truly atrocious into one that’s just frustrating by constantly playing the immediacy of her situation. We believe her cold, exhaustion, and rising grief at the thought that she might not get home in time to say goodbye to her sister. She channels something true into a script that’s constantly working against her by refusing to play anything straight. We may never know what’s really happening in “The Occupant,” but the terror and heartbreak in Balinska’s eyes often keep the film grounded, if not quite often enough.
Ultimately, “The Occupant” feels like a student project that could have benefited from a few more revisions in the writing process. Part sci-fi, part family drama, part survival horror, it reminds one of an oft-repeated critical phrase of mine: If you make multiple movies at the same time, you often fail at making one.
