Dark Skies (2013)

Dark Skies arrives with the Blumhouse seal, produced by the same hands that gave us Paranormal Activity and Insidious, and it conducts itself with the grim professionalism of a contractor finishing a basement. Scott Stewart wrote and directed. The Barret family lives on a quiet suburban street in an unnamed American city. Daniel is unemployed. Lacy sells real estate. Their sons talk through walkie-talkies from their beds. Then the kitchen rearranges itself overnight, birds fly into the siding, and a figure stands over the youngest boy's bed until the light comes on and the room is empty.

What follows is abduction lore assembled with competence and no particular urgency. Catatonic episodes. Geometric marks on small torsos. A specialist named Edwin Pollard, played by J.K. Simmons with the weary authority of a man who has explained the Greys too many times, warns that the family has been chosen. The Barrets board up the windows on the Fourth of July and eat dinner while the television plays fireworks. The film means this as irony. It lands as set dressing.

The cultural ledger here is blank, and not in a coy way. This is a haunted-house picture with a saucer, and its anxieties are domestic and financial in the ordinary sense: a mortgage, a marriage, a child taken. The whiteness of the cast goes unremarked because the film has no interest in remarking on anything. The mother's income carries the household, but the screenplay draws no conclusion from it. There is no sermon, no thesis, no instructive pause. Critics split, forty-two percent on the aggregator, a C-plus from audiences. A workmanlike piece of suspense, as the Washington Post put it, and nothing more.