Their world crumbled, so they came to ours.
They came from far away and are doing their best to assimilate — to our ways, our beliefs, our culture, even our appearance. It’s all pretty baffling to them, but they’re trying, and they pick it up quickly. After a couple of days, you can’t really tell them from anyone else. Sure, their movements are a little strange, and their speech is a little halting, but who can’t you say that about? In time, they will walk, talk, consume and procreate just like the rest of us. It’s the American dream.
If that sounds like a modern-day allegory, reader, you are on the right track. The Becomers, written and directed by Zach Clark, is an immigration story of two alien lovers who travel across the cosmos and land in COVID-era America with the sole mission of finding each other again.
To blend in, they inhabit the bodies of unsuspecting victims — glowing blue and purple eye sockets are their only giveaways. But some bodies hold the lovers better than others, and they must switch every now and then. They do this by taking over a new body and then dissolving the previous vessel by vomiting up some rather powerful acid. It’s pretty gross. As for the bodies they take: Gender, age, race and class mean nothing to them. That gives the body snatching a delightfully fluid take on romance.
The Becomers is a low-budget sci-fi endeavor, and Clark relies on a narrative that opens with intrigue and builds on cleverness to keep the audience engaged. You don’t learn everything you need right up front, and you don’t need to. Clark gives you just enough to ground you but plenty more to interest you.
A large part of that is through the voiceover narration, read by Russell Mael of the band Sparks. At first, these aural diversions don’t seem to be anchored in any particular time and place and don’t inform or illustrate what we are seeing as the two lovers (played by Isabel Alamin, Molly Plunk, Keith Kelly, Mike Lopez and Jacquelyn Haas) move through the world in the present. Then, the narration and the narrative converge, and Clark shows just how much can be achieved with so little.
Budgets be damned. The Becomers is a clever piece of work with a clear point of view and the right avenue to express it. And that is something all the money in the world cannot buy.
ON SCREEN: The Becomers. 8:30 p.m. Friday, Sept. 20, Dairy Arts Center, 2590 Walnut St., Boulder.