87 min | PG-13 | August 11, 2023 | Bleecker Street
A lonely Pennsylvania widower discovers a crashed flying saucer in his backyard and a small gray alien hiding in the bushes. He does not call the authorities. He offers it apple slices and a place to stay.
Milton Robinson lives alone in a small Pennsylvania town and shows up every week to tell the city council the same complaints. The crosswalk sign is confusing. The town motto has a grammatical error. Then a spaceship crashes into his garden and a wordless alien climbs out. Milton takes the creature in and tends to it the way you tend to a stray. The film uses science fiction as a delivery system for a story about aging, isolation, and the early erosion of memory.
Ben Kingsley plays Milton with a stillness that does the heavy lifting. He forgets his daughter’s job and his own appointments, and Kingsley lets the confusion register a half second before Milton covers it. He treats the alien, played in silence by Jade Quon, as the first listener who never grows impatient. Harriet Sansom Harris and Jane Curtin arrive as Sandy and Joyce, two other lonely locals who get pulled into the secret. Curtin sharpens every line into something dry and unsentimental. Zoe Winters plays Milton’s daughter Denise with a worry that reads as love and exhaustion at once.
Marc Turtletaub directs from a script by Gavin Steckler, and the two keep the scale deliberately small. The alien never speaks and never performs a miracle on cue. The production design grounds everything in worn kitchens, council-chamber fluorescents, and the faded green of a suburban lawn, so the saucer reads as an intrusion rather than a spectacle. The score stays quiet and lets long pauses sit. Turtletaub trusts the silences between Milton and Jules to carry the relationship, and the restraint is the point.
This is a film about people the world has decided to stop listening to, and the strange visitor who finally does. The metaphor is plain and the film knows it. Jules functions less as a character than as a patient ear for three people running out of time to be heard. The premise stays modest and the emotional payoff stays modest with it. What lingers is Kingsley, holding a man together one forgotten detail at a time.