Encounter

A film I find myself think­ing about a lot is Jeff Nichols’ Take Shel­ter from 2011, in which Michael Shan­non plays a father plagued by apoc­a­lyp­tic visions which lead him to con­struct a bunker beneath his prop­er­ty in Ohio. The ques­tion hangs over the film as to whether his pre­mo­ni­tions are real or a symp­tom of men­tal ill­ness; it’s a beau­ti­ful, haunt­ing end-of-days dra­ma that reg­u­lar­ly springs to mind when­ev­er I have a night­mare, or see a par­tic­u­lar­ly over­cast sky.

Michael Pearce’s sec­ond fea­ture Encounter recalls Nichols’ work, but only in that it’s an infe­ri­or film which deals with sim­i­lar sub­ject mat­ter. Riz Ahmed plays ex-marine Mal­ick Kahn, who appears to be on some sort of covert mis­sion con­cern­ing extrater­res­tri­al par­a­sites that are invad­ing the world. He trav­els to his ex-wife Piya (Jan­i­na Gavankar) and her part­ner Dylan (Misha Collins) to res­cue his young sons, Bob­by (Aditya Ged­da­da) and Jay (Lucian-Riv­er Chauhan). The trio then set off on a road trip to a base Mal­ick believes should pro­vide safety.

But not every­thing is as it seems. Vio­lent run-ins with oth­er peo­ple on their jour­ney lead Jay to ques­tion his father’s sto­ry, and it soon becomes appar­ent that the threat may be clos­er to home than any of them wants to admit. Encounter has an inter­est­ing premise, but the film rehash­es harm­ful tropes about the poten­tial dan­ger peo­ple with men­tal ill­ness­es pose to others.

Time and again we see schiz­o­phre­nia used as a plot device in films, usu­al­ly paint­ing peo­ple with the con­di­tion as unsta­ble and dan­ger­ous to those around them. Encounter sad­ly typ­i­fies this stereo­type, as the local law enforce­ment becomes con­vinced that Mal­ick is a ​“fam­i­ly anni­hi­la­tor”. The film becomes so con­cerned with action scenes that it fails to chal­lenge this pre­con­cep­tion, and the sci-fi plot is dropped entire­ly once Malick’s psy­chosis is revealed, lead­ing to frus­trat­ing a lack of ambiguity.

While Ahmed gives a typ­i­cal­ly strong per­for­mance, the real stars are Lucian-Riv­er Chauhan and Aditya Ged­da­da. They have a charm­ing screen pres­ence and won­der­ful rap­port with Ahmed, and real­ly are the film’s sav­ing grace among a plot that is at best ill-advised, at worst offen­sive to peo­ple liv­ing with a men­tal ill­ness. It’s a shame con­sid­er­ing that Pearce’s debut Beast felt like a more nuanced approach to men­tal insta­bil­i­ty and avoid­ed pre­sent­ing the most vul­ner­a­ble mem­bers of soci­ety as a threat to their loved ones.

There is already a stig­ma around PTSD and men­tal ill­ness in sol­diers return­ing from war zones; Encounter makes no attempt to chal­lenge this, instead lean­ing into the notion that trau­ma often leads to vio­lence. It’s a deeply unpleas­ant and reac­tionary film that even com­pelling cen­tral per­for­mances can’t save.