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‘The Becomers’ Review: A Satirical Space Odyssey Writ Too Small

Body-snatching extraterrestrials are flummoxed by suburban Illinois in Zach Clark’s promising but too-mild mix of sci-fi fantasy and social commentary.

But despite its fantastical hook, this episodic narrative lands short of the curiously winsome black comedy quirkiness its writer-director achieved with prior features “Little Sister” and “White Reindeer.” A sort of shaggy dog story whose appeal wanes as one gradually realizes it’s unlikely to go anywhere in particular, “The Becomers” is equally mild as sci-fi, spoof and sociopolitical satire. Russell Mael of the long-running cult band Sparks commences things with voiceover narration as our nameless, genderless protagonist, relating a backstory — thoughout this film’s present-tense progress — of life on a dying home planet. They’re also fanatical conspiracy theorists in a QAnon mode who are already neck-deep in a criminal plot they think will combat a “devil-worshipping elite.” That greatly complicates our narrator’s reunion with “my lover,” a neon-pink-eyed changeling who turns up in one human guise (a bus driver played by Jacquelyn Haas), and then switches to another.

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