Hugo Keijzer’s The Occupant is a striking, visually impressive survivalist genre film powered by an intense and kinetic performance from Ella Balinska, who appears in practically every scene. It’s a haunting, almost poetic movie, magnetically fascinating, and yet occasionally frustrating and confounding as it skirts in, out and around genre conventions but ultimately refuses to pin its colours to any particular mast. But for all its faults and missteps, it’s a film that will make you care about its lead character and draw you into her life, the predicament she finds herself in, and the struggle to survive that she faces.
Balinska plays geologist Abby, whose sister Beth is dying from cancer. Abby refuses to accept that the diagnosis is terminal and, in order to secure funds for a course of treatment that she is convinced will save her, takes a job at a uranium mine in Northern Georgia. The helicopter taking her home crashes in the Caucasus Mountains, and with the crew killed, she finds herself alone in a cold, hostile, remote environment. Fortunately she finds a functioning radio which connects her with a man named John (Rob Delaney, voice only), who is, he says, stranded just a few miles away.
If she can just make her way across the barren, unforgivingly bleak terrain to reach him, perhaps they can help one another and find their way back to civilisation? But something’s not quite right about John; he’s far too upbeat and snarky considering his apparently precarious situation. Just to add to the sense of weirdness and dislocation, Abby exhumes a lump of rock from the snow and ice which has some very strange and distinctly unearthly properties…
The Occupant belongs almost entirely to Balinska (previously best known for the 2019 Charlie’s Angels). Her performance is astonishing, as Abby faces the challenge of staying alive in an untamed wilderness, while dealing with the very real likelihood that she won’t be able to save her sister and won’t even be at her side when she passes away. The film ultimately becomes a study of grief and grief management, loss and the survival instinct inherent in us all. As such, it’s powerful and its striking – it’s a hugely good-looking film – but there are times where it asks too many questions it doesn’t feel compelled to answer.
What exactly is the purpose of the strange object Abby finds in the snow? Who or what is John? Is he real or a ghost or some figment or her mind as she tries to cope with the survival ordeal? The Occupant is troubled both with narrative opaqueness and frustrating pacing issues that slow it to a crawl in places. While it offers up an ending that’s both poignant and bittersweet, as the credits roll, you’ll be none the wiser as to exactly what the film is trying to say, even if it’s clear that it’s trying to make points about the human condition and coming to terms with not only our own mortality but the mortality of those around us.
THE OCCUPANT is now available to stream in the UK and USA.
