Slamdance 2022 Film Festival – In We Are Living Things, Solomon (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) and Chuyao (Xingchen Lyu) have a strange and uncanny bond. Each has an alien abduction story that altered the direction of their lives. This is the thread that thrusts two unlikely strangers together, ultimately embarking upon a road trip to try to find answers. While the possibility of extraterrestrial life drives at least part of the narrative, this is a film very much about what it means to be a human, living on the fringes of society.

Solomon claims a spaceship snatched his mom from an Arizona desert when he was a boy. When he’s not working as a handyman, he spends countless hours studying the skies and using his makeshift radio and antennas to locate his mom. He’s sure she’s out there somewhere. By happenstance, Solomon meets Chuyao, who works at a nail salon and deals with a brute man who takes her to a sex club. There, she’s placed in latex and hardly able to breathe as men fondle her. Besides that, she has to dodge ICE agents, who raid her work, snatch her ID, and act as an ever-present threat.

While aliens may play a big part in Solomon and Chuyao’s stories, this is very much a film about two immigrants who feel Othered in American society. Solomon lives in a shack, dealing with the personal trauma of his mother’s disappearance. Since migrating from China, Chuyao fears deportation and sexual assault, too. At one point, she claims aliens abducted her from her hometown. But these abduction stories may serve as a way to process what happened to these two underdog characters and the trauma they haven’t fully processed. It’s what binds them, and Guerrero and Lyu do have chemistry together, especially once the road trip starts.

In fact, in terms of pacing, the second half of the film is much tighter. The first 40 minutes or so feel slower than they should and mostly follow Solomon, as he tries to connect with Chuyao. You just want them to get in the van already and drive to Arizona. Along the way, they meet Constance (O-Lan Jones), who knew Solomon’s mom and also claims she was abducted. She lives in a trailer with Darren (Paul Cooper), who oozes xenophobia and barks that Solomon and Chuyao should return to their countries. I wish these characters were more present in the film instead of a pit stop. They spark much-needed tension.

Generally, this is a decent feature by director Antonio Tibaldi, who wrote the script with Alex Lora. We feel for the two main characters. There’s also some stunning camerawork and cinematography here, too, especially shots of the night sky or the sprawling desert. The natural world comes alive, making the universe feel that much more expansive. While the film is about alien abductions to some extent, it’s more about what it feels like to be an outsider, living underground, sometimes literally.  For all the imagery of starry skies and the potential for a spacecraft to pop up, this is very much a human,character-driven story. It’s about two people who learn to find something meaningful, not by gazing at the stars, but by trusting in each other. If only others saw them as human.

We Are Living Things screened as part of the 2022 Slamdance Film Festival, running from January 27-February 6.

6.5 Out of 10 Bright Lights in the Sky