Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: DESCENDENT [SXSW Film 2025 - Austin, Texas]
Unlike normal aspects of alien abduction movies, "Descendent" [Midnighter] does something interesting in working with textures of self. Sean Bruner (Ross Marquand) is about to become a dad for the first time. He tries his best but, like many husbands, falls short. He wants to provide and yet society has changed different facets of who and what he can be. His wife Andrea (Sarah Bolger) is strong, capable, feminine and yet also wants to be cared for like any human being. It is not as if Sean is trying to be overly ambitious but there seems to be certain contexts of masculinity that float in his mind. When he goes to fix a light at work, he is seemingly abducted by aliens. What the film does really well, in retrospect, is the context of structure. Sean's experience rests in certain ideas of what he thinks he is. It uses the abduction as a starting point. However, the meaning of the motivation of what happens in the film: no reason. It is more a facilitation for an existential journey for Sean more as a metaphor than anything else. While this is interesting, it is not about the horror but about the character work.
Sean's unraveling (while done with some humorous elements with his woul- be cousin) is a reflection of paranoia. Painting, psychologists and the need to figure it out is kept on the up and up until it gets to the flashpoint of what needs to happen for the plot to move on. What is interesting is that there is foreshadowing throughout which very much works because it all revolves back to what causes his trepidation about fatherhood anyways. Now whether a concussion caused this or by psychotropic wrangling is open to interpretation but like certain films this year at SXSW in reality or supernatural, it is about the context of a second chance even if the character is not aware of why they are being given that opportunity. Bolger is the one who sells the film almost more than Marquand especially in one scene when she describes how terrified she is to which he can say nothing despite the chaos going on in his own head. "Descendent" is a character piece wrapped in a genre structure which is always more palpable even if the reasoning (despite great structure) is not all together sound. That said, at least the empathy rings true. B+
By Tim Wassberg
