PLOT: Decades after witnessing her mother’s alien abduction, a woman gets caught up in the bizarre activities of a UFO cult.
REVIEW: Writer/director Jefferson Moneo’s sci-fi thriller Cosmic Dawn (watch it HERE) – which he says was inspired by an extraterrestrial encounter he had as a child – centers on a woman named Aurora (played by Camille Rowe), whose mother is said to have disappeared when she was a child… but Aurora knows exactly what happened to her mom. She was abducted by aliens, and little Aurora was witness to it. So it’s no surprise that when we catch up to her as an adult (played by Camille Rowe) she’s burying her memories and emotions with drugs and alcohol. Then she starts to have visions that seem to lure her into a bookstore run by Natalie (Emmanuelle Chriqui), who recommends a book to her: Cosmic Dawn, by a woman named Elyse.
Aurora soon finds out that Natalie is a member of a UFO cult that’s run by Elyse (Antonia Zegers), and that all of this cult’s members have witnessed alien abductions, just like Aurora did. Well, almost all of them. Natalie’s husband Tom (Joshua Burge) is a skeptic, just there to support his wife. As Aurora joins the cult members in an isolated location they call the Mothership, we have the sense that something is going to go terrible wrong here – and Moneo tells us we’re right to be suspicious, because he has the story play out in two different time periods. Scenes of Aurora interacting with Elyse, Natalie, Tom, and the others at the Mothership are intercut with scenes set four years later, at which time Aurora is no longer associated with the cult. Now it seems its members are trying to draw her back.
I found Cosmic Dawn to be a very intriguing movie, and I was hooked to see exactly how things were going to fall apart at the Mothership – and how crazy the situation was going to get by the end of the film. The movie is carried by some terrific performances from the lead cast members, which is no surprise in the cases of Chriqui and Zegers, as they have been working steadily since the ’90s, but I was also impressed by relative newcomers Burge and Rowe. In the scenes where he expressed skepticism over what was going on at the Mothership, Burge made Tom stand out as my favorite character in the movie, while Rowe did a great job of playing our emotionally troubled heroine.
Beyond the acting, I was also wowed by some of the showy visuals Moneo dropped in here and there. I’m sure this film is going to gather a lot of fans who are into those trippy visuals, as well as the musical aspect of the movie. Not only does Cosmic Dawn boast a score composed by Halloween franchise veteran Alan Howarth, it also features five songs from the band MGMT, plus multiple tracks written by MGMT’s Andrew VanWyngarden. Surprisingly, neither Howarth or MGMT are responsible for the tune “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft”, which the cult starts singing at one point and which plays over the end credits. Anyone who watches this movie is probably going to find it quite a challenge not to get “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” stuck in their heads.
Cosmic Dawn has a lot going for it, but there are also shortcomings. There’s a bunch of build-up in the movie to pay-off I didn’t find to be completely satisfying. Things never got quite as weird, crazy, or unnerving as I was hoping they would. Much of the film’s 98 minutes (and that could have been cut down some) consists of conversations between members of the Cosmic Dawn cult, and there came a point when I got tired of waiting for something exciting to happen.
This movie will be exactly the type of odd that some viewers will be looking for, while others will find it to be too uneventful. And I lean more toward the latter. I’m glad I watched Cosmic Dawn, and there’s plenty I liked about it, but in the end there wasn’t enough there for me to want to watch it again. It’s worth a look, but it’s a “one and done” movie as far as I’m concerned.
Cranked Up Films, the genre-focused label of Good Deed Entertainment, is giving Cosmic Dawn a theatrical and VOD release on February 11th.