Out There
By its very nature, the unexplained is inexplicable, Wales for some reason apparently the most likely place in the United Kingdom where one might encounter an unidentified flying object, Mari having been raised to love the stars by meteorologist father Doctor Lew Bevan, sneaking away from her mother and sister one night and stowing away in the back of his car as he is called to work at a Ministry of Defence facility, witness to the industrial accident in which he died on that August night in 1994.
The object spotted in the sky that night becoming known as “the Caradoc Thing,” useful for Shifty Gruff to peddle branded tourist tat alongside his under-the-counter “jazz cabbage,” five years later Mari sees rotating lights above the woods, her best friend Little Elis concerned in that she was gone longer than she realised and the next day encountering conspiracy theorist Bryn, coming to believe that her father may have been abducted by aliens who are now returning.
Its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival attended by writer and director Simon Ryninks alongside stars Aneurin Barnard and Remy Beasley who play Bryn and Mari’s widowed mother Alwen, patient but stretched by her two girls, younger daughter Cari (Olivia Southgate) a feisty handful who refuses to let Down’s syndrome slow her ambition, Out There has one hand in the Children’s Film Foundation and the other in The X-Files.
With Barbarians’ Iwan Rheon as Lew, Timestalker‘s Alice Lowe as his former associate Doctor Seren Bandles, Good Omens’ Michael Sheen as Gruff and Alien: Earth’s Tom Moya as Elis, keen to escape Caradoc but apprehensive about starting university in London and leaving his closest friend, the ensemble shines but the is guided by Nerys Amber Stocks as Maz, her memory of her father’s death obscured by trauma but now beginning to clear after her forest encounter but bringing strange questions rather than answers or closure.
Bryn of no fixed abode and seeking “bullet proof evidence, no room for plausible deniability,” his enthusiasm, expertise and improvisational skills are not the same as actual competence, but all Maz wants is her father, Out There searching the Welsh countryside with genuine heart and spirit as well as pace, the trio outnumbered by the authorities but with unexpected allies, Cari and the Bad Boys out well past their bedtime.
A film of sinister cover-ups and exploding camper vans, of strange lights in the sky offering hope against the odds, of family and friendship and fighting through as well as more than a handful of classic science fiction references, Out There is a small film of big feelings of love and grief which offers a warm glow even as with bittersweet insight it reflects Carl Sagan’s position that even if it is not what you might have wanted to hear, knowing that you have learned the truth can be its own reward.
Edinburgh International Film Festival continues until Wednesday 19th August
