Reel Review: The Becomers (2024)

Sweet, satirically funny, sometimes gnarly, and delightfully off-kilter, “The Becomers” is a modern-day “Invasion” that really lands.

Billed as a romantic tale of two body-swapping aliens trying to find their place on this big, dumb planet, The Becomers from writer/director Zach Clark is best described as Invasion of the Body Snatchers told from the perspective of the aliens—one in which the invaders are pursuing something far more personal and intimate than world domination.

Two young lovers, escaping a dying planet, land on Earth. Separated during travel, they are desperate to reunite while learning to assimilate amongst humans.

Beginning with a heavy dose of sci-fi and horror, we’re dropped into a surreal nightmare in which an alien ship has landed on Earth, spelling certain doom for the unfortunate humans who happen to be in its vicinity.

With strange visuals and a disorienting, discordant score, it’s both chilling and impressively peculiar.

The Becomers is a wryly funny tale of love and hope in a pandemic-era time of suspicion and disunion.

The film lovingly embraces its lo-fi sci-fi roots while bringing a distinctly modern flair to its politically charged satire.

The original 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, adapted from the 1955 novel The Body Snatchers, tapped directly into Americans’ immediate anxieties at the time, exploiting the rampant fear of ‘the enemy within’ that resulted from the public pursuit of enemy spies during the age of McCarthyism and the Red Scare.

The Becomers drops its aliens in the middle of a paranoid, deeply divided 2020/2021 America plagued by wild conspiracy theories and a universal distrust of media, politicians, and even friends and neighbors.

In cinema, as in reality, common themes repeat, and everything old becomes new again.

As our alien assimilators move from one human vessel to another, trying to find a body they can get comfortable in, they attempt to fit into their new hosts’ lives and pass for humans. But these humans lead complicated and, often, very messy lives.

Thus, our unnamed invaders keep finding themselves in precarious situations that greatly complicate their desire to lead a peaceful existence on their new home planet, resulting in a wild ride of increasingly bizarre episodic adventures.

The aliens’ backstory is told through sporadic narration throughout the film. This clever device provides details drip by drip, avoiding the dreaded exposition dump and allowing Clark to get right into the meat of the story. Sparks’ frontman Russell Mael lends his dulcet-toned pipes to the role of deadpan narrator.

It’s both unnerving and hilarious to watch our literally star-crossed lovers trying to find their way in an often inhospitable environment.

It’s a poignant and potent skewering of humanity as we watch these unbelievably weird extraterrestrials become more and more relatable, realizing just how much weirder and more nefarious Earth’s native inhabitants are.

The Becomers may explore social horror with the resurgence of old anxieties, but it’s a thoroughly contemporary affair that explores a modern-era understanding of gender fluidity and more expansive views of human sexuality.

Our lovestruck aliens come from a planet where gender and race are meaningless. Bodies are just vessels, and it’s the soul connection that counts.

When not wearing contacts to blend in, the aliens have brightly colored glowing eyes. One has pink eyes and the other blue. This is how you can track who is who as they body swap. It’s also a playful nod to gender stereotypes that the film brilliantly deconstructs.

As The Becomers embraces non-traditional sexuality, it delivers one of the most unforgettably off-kilter sex scenes in cinema, highlighting how inherently freaky, mysterious, and even a bit grotesque all human sex really is — so who are any of us to judge anyone else’s proclivities?

Various actors play the alien couple as they switch bodies, and each is as game for the kooky hijinks as the last, with Molly Plunk a particular standout.

With its sweet and tender love story interspersed with plenty of goopy, gross-out body horror, it’s an endearing tale of transcendent love and a scathing indictment of our perverse planet.

Wildly unpredictable and consistently captivating, The Becomers is a difficult to resist oddity that begins and ends with a bang and never fizzles out in between.