Simon Ryninks's debut feature, Out There, is a likably daft but big-hearted YA comedy drama, inspired by West Wales's reputation as a hotspot for UFO sightings – particularly Broad Haven in Pembrokeshire, where many people in 1977 reported close encounters. Set in the fictionalised Welsh town of Caradoc in 1999, the film revels in the era's details: smoking in pubs, dot-matrix printouts, Sony Handicam video cameras, and droll references to the New Labour government.
A Teen's Quest to Uncover the Truth
Maz (Nerys Amber Stocks) is a teenager doing A-levels, haunted by the death of her father five years earlier. A scientist at a top secret Ministry of Defence base, he was killed in a mysterious incident involving a flash of white light from above. Maz witnessed the event as a child, having smuggled herself into the base in the back of his car, but now can't quite remember it in detail. The film leaves open the question: is it PTSD, or have aliens wiped her memory?
Convinced her dad wasn't killed but abducted by aliens, Maz plans to get back into the heavily guarded base. She enlists her loyal but nervous best mate Elis (Tom Maya) and gibbering local ufologist Bryn (Aneurin Barnard). For extra help understanding the cosmos, they approach new age shop owner and drug enthusiast Shifty Gruff (an amusing Michael Sheen), Caradoc's own Howard Marks, who supplies shrooms to local youth and offers hypnotherapy to unlock Maz's memories.
Hypnosis and Cosmic Revelations
“Have you done regression therapy before?” asks Elis suspiciously. “I have in a past life …” says Gruff smoothly. When his hypnosis unexpectedly succeeds, Gruff becomes very excited. Elis warns him: “With great ability comes great …” and Gruff interrupts: “Commercial opportunity!”
Amid the extraterrestrial shenanigans, the film offers melancholy thoughts that UFO belief is an inability to accept death, to accept that this, here on Earth, is all that there is. It's entertaining stuff from Ryninks, though the excellent Kimberley Nixon is underused. Out There could spin off nicely as a TV series.
