In this science fiction romantic comedy, an alien who has lived its whole life as a sound wave comes to inhabit the body of a young woman, Micah. The alien, soon dubbed “Sound” (hence the awkward syntax of the film’s title), gets to go on a journey of discovery, doing all the things you can’t do when you’re a sound wave like eating hamburgers, playing drums, picking out clothes and drunkenly kissing one’s friends.
So far, so very The Man Who Fell to Earth, you might be thinking. Or, if you’re one of the few people who’s seen it, you might think that this sounds even closer to Natasha Kermani’s brilliant, beautiful Imitation Girl. Or maybe if you’re a philistine, you might be thinking of Mork & Mindy or something, I don’t know. The fact is that “aliens learning what it means to be human” is a premise that’s been done over and done over, so any new attempt at it severely needs to bring with it some kind of twist on the premise, something that makes it uniquely itself and not just another iteration of a much-rehashed concept.
For That Alien, Sound the particular twist is that Sound, as a sound wave, is particularly attuned to music. She talks a lot about music, she gets excited even by shitty music like the kind played by the brother of Micah, the girl whose body she’s inhabiting, and she talks a little bit about Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin. She doesn’t express much interest in sounds of a non-musical nature, though we might expect them to be just as interesting to an alien made of sound – mightn’t we? Actually, if anything you’d think that music and sound would be the least interesting part about finally having a body; it’s the one part of this experience that isn’t new to her.
But what do I know about aliens? Sound has spent her whole life listening to radio broadcasts from Earth – you know, sound waves never die, they bounce through space forever, man – which allows for the script convenience that she comes to Earth already knowing quite a lot. This is portrayed fairly inconsistently, and one wonders how much an alien with no body or knowledge of Earth would really get from political talk radio anyway. Carl Sagan sounds pretty convincing when he says that J. S. Bach and Chuck Berry speak such a universal language that even an alien could appreciate them, but you have to draw the line somewhere, don’t you?
In any case, much as she’s enjoying all these novel experiences, Sound is aware, acutely, that she’s possessing someone else’s body and it’s not really OK to just take someone’s body without their permission like that (the initial event that put her in Micah’s body wasn’t her choice, just some weird cosmic alignment). And so, eventually, the film finds itself a goal for its central character to aim for – to switch back. It’s nice to see the filmmakers acknowledge some of the issues of consent that come with the body-swap comedy formula, though they don’t really go far enough. Sound objects to smoking when it’s someone else’s body, but she drinks, kisses other people and eats meat without much concern (her host is vegetarian). It all just seems to open a can of worms, and there’s a generally icky feeling to the whole film. This ickiness has its fullest impression in how the narrative treats the boyfriend character, Shannon. He’s well-played by Will Tranfo, who gives a sense of compassion to a character we’re apparently meant to hate just because he has different life goals from his girlfriend and is given to moments of cringe. It’s an odd decision for a film that seems to otherwise express a sense of humanist compassion.
Shannon finds his opposite number in Rita, played by Quinn Marcus, who we are seemingly supposed to embrace as a character, but Rita is thoroughly offputting: rude, lazy, hostile and intellectually incurious. Fortunately, Mia Danelle as Sound brings enough wonderment, childlike joy and just plain goofiness to compensate for the film’s likeability deficit. Also much appreciated are Micah’s family: mother Amy Hill, father Richard Masur and, best of all, brother Deyo Forteza who’s probably the nicest person in the whole thing, whether human or sentient sound.
That Alien, Sound may not manage to be as moving, as funny, or as thought-provoking as it seemingly sets out to be, but it does make for, at the very least, a showcase of how much life a talented cast can bring to such a warmed-over premise.