Native

Dir Daniel Fitzsimmons, UK 2016 On UK release from 23 February

Native is principally the story of scientists Cane and Eva. Selected to steer a ship across the stars in the hope of locating the planet from which a mysterious signal appears to emanate, the pair are human in appearance but clearly follow a different set of rules to

Homo sapiens, eschewing emotion for logic (like everyone’s favourite Vulcan) and demonstrating welldeveloped telepathic abilities. The latter skill enables them to maintain communications with their loved ones back on their home planet, Cane with his wife Awan and Eva with partner Seth.

Mid, ahem, star trek, Awan dies in childbirth (when Cane tells Eva that his wife is pregnant with four children, Eva replies laconically “why so few”?). The event triggers a lengthy and complicated breakdown in which Cane questions his own identity, his ingrained avoidance of emotions and the constricting hive structure of his own people. He becomes obsessed with a piece of classical music, and his obsessive deconstructing of its sonic textures becomes a metaphor for his own self-discovery. And all the while his travelling partner Eva – mentally linked with cool, rational Seth – struggles to maintain her professionalism and indeed keep the colonial mission on track in the face of her companion’s meltdown.

Daniel Fitzsimmons’s debut feature was well received on the

2016 festival circuit, receiving Best New Filmmaker award at the Boston Science Fiction Festival and a number of other nominations. After that, the film seemed to go into hiding but the good news is that a UK theatrical release is imminent.

Arguably, Native is a short film stretched to feature length, but despite the low budget and the limitations of the story it’s a fascinating watch. TV regulars Rupert Graves as Cane and Ellie Kendrick as Eva are extremely well cast; their small screen training equips them well for the close-up nature of much of the film’s photography, essential in conveying the complex facial movements that reflect their conflict of conscience.

It’s Fitzsimmons’s choice of pace that’s the really interesting thing about this film. In a lesser director’s hands Native could have been a soporific experience – and indeed the first 15 minutes or so don’t bode well – but the slow accretion of details attracts rather than repels the viewer. Stylistically, Native takes its tone from Andrei Tarkovsky’s

Solaris (1972) and thematically from Nicolas Roeg’s The Man

Who Fell to Earth (1976); these are bold movies to draw on in your first feature, but in the end it’s the performances and the cool, detached but involving script that won me over. This is a slow, carefully played film, which in the end raises some big questions about our existence. Recommended.