When I saw the trailer for “Proximity,” I couldn’t wait to see it. I was hoping for a tense sci-fi thriller filled with a cool nostalgic vibe but blended with its own brand of strangeness and that’s precisely what you get… for the most part.
The story follows NASA junior scientist Isaac (Ryan Masson). While at work, he finds a mysterious signal from space with unknown origins. A few days later he witnesses a crashed “meteor” while he’s filming a video diary on a mountain ridge and decides to get a closer look. There he encounters something not of this world and wakes up three days later with no knowledge of where he’s been or what happened to him.
As he tries to put the puzzle pieces together in the following days, he turns to the internet to get his story out. At first, things seem like they’re going well, but soon the web turns against him and his incredible footage. He contacts Sara (Highdee Kuan), a person with a similar experience in hopes she may hold the key to unlock what has happened to him.
Quickly his story gets the attention of a secret government agency who takes Isaac and Sara away to an underground facility for interrogation. They want to know about their experience and test them to see if their experience gave them any unworldly powers. They also have questions about a person who claimed to be abducted in the Alaskan wilderness in 1979 and think Isaac and Sara might know how to contact him.
They manage to flee the facility and team up with hacker Zed (Christian Prentice) and head off to Canada to try to find the mysterious Carl Meisner (Don Scribner). They hope to get answers to why the government has such an interest in a man missing for the past 30 years.
The third act is where the film starts to come undone with changes in music and unnecessary scenes of Isaac and Sara's budding romance. These scenes felt like an afterthought and included to make sure we know the two get growing close and it doesn’t work. The reveal at the end is unexpected and an interesting choice. I commend writer/director Eric Demeusy for going bold and not playing it too safe.
“Proximity” is uneven in its storytelling and some of the acting is not great at times, but it was the music that was most jarring for me. The score is brilliant for most of the movie, but shifts at the end from ominous tones to bad 80s movie songs. It’s not needed and takes the steam out of the flick.
Some might call out Masson’s awkward performance in the lead, but I thought the choice was perfect for the character’s arc and worked great. Prentice and Scribner were spot on as well, with Scribner holding court in each of his scenes. Kuan is reliable, but there are a few moments of her performance throughout the film that just didn’t work for me.
Now let’s move onto the visual effects. For a low budget film, I thought the effects were brilliant. There are times where the effects aren’t ILM worthy, but for the most part, they worked incredibly well.
The film capitalizes on its nostalgic feel by having a mishmash of technology used by the characters and their world. At first, I was questioning it, but very soon fell in love with it and loved the choice made by Demeusy. There’s also a “Fire in the Sky” and “THX 1138” vibe at times in the flick, which only made me dig it even more.
“Proximity” struggles with its story at times, but I found it to be a very cool film that worked until it didn’t. A few cuts here and there would have tightened things up and sticking with the excellent score from beginning to end would have only strengthened the film and put it over the top.