'The Fourth Kind': An encounter to avoid

The vogue for verité spooks continues with "The Fourth Kind," but unlike the understated stylistic rigor of the first-person-fashioned "Paranormal Activity," this alien abduction showpiece about unexplained events in Nome, Alaska, doth protest its bona fides too much.

Presented as a cinematic re-creation of traumatic, mysterious occurrences -- suicides, stalking owls, demonic-sounding recordings -- surrounding sleep-deprived patients of psychologist Abigail Tyler ( Milla Jovovich), writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi attempts an Orson Welles-like confluence of "real" and imagined that might have worked had he gotten out of the way more, literally and figuratively. As in, there's ludicrous video footage of a solemn Osunsanmi interviewing a gaunt, horror-stricken Tyler, as well as overwrought dramatizations featuring Tyler, a friendly, doubting colleague ( Elias Koteas) and an all-skeptical sheriff ( Will Patton).

The irony is that the " documentary" moments of patients videotaped under hypnosis -- often regrettably placed side by side with their reenactments -- contain the only genuine shocks, whereas the "directed" scenes traffic in telegraphed scoring, excessive photographic effects and laughable histrionics. Trying to freak out an audience with a new twist on UFO sightings is admirable, but after the umpteenth time the words "Actual Audio" appear on-screen, one's patience for suspending disbelief in "The Fourth Kind" comes crashing to Earth.

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