Fantasia Review: Jermaine Fowler Makes for a Mean Green Mega-Star Weirdo in the Totally Unexpected 'Terrestrial'

Movies that look like they’re going one way only to swerve toward a totally unexpected direction mid-film are having a big year this year. But that might just be because that’s what it feels like, just living in the world today—as if we’ve swatted aside the complex loops of The Matrix to discover we’ve simply been walking on a mountainous pile of carpets that are one by one by one by one getting yanked out from under us, simply and buffoonishly pratfalling us unto our oblivion. There’s absoolutely nothing cool about this experience. So yes the unraveling of genre distinctions in films like Companion and Sinners have plenty of filmic forebears that they’re consciously riffing on, but the sheer absurdity of absolutely everything everywhere all at once is what feels notable about right now. Chaos reigns. Cinematically and, you know, otherwise.

So leave it to the filmmaker behind Hot Tub Time Machine to embrace that dizzying ethos whole-heartedly, delivering with his latest movie Terrestrial (which just world-premiered at Fantasia) a good heaping bounty of not at all what you’re expecting from that title on downward. It would perhaps behoove you to look to writer-director Steve Pink’s writing credits on Grosse Pointe Blank and High Fidelity to suss out where Terrestrial’s aiming to take us; more than by half-glancing at anything that’s happening in the film’s first act and a half anyway, structured as it is as one un-remrked-upon fake-out after another. But let’s begin, as one does, with the film’s beginning anyway.

Terrestrial stars (in what in a just world would be a star turn for a long underappreciated performer) Jermaine Fowler (Sorry to Bother You) as an adorably dorky wannabe sci-fi author named Allen, whose many years of struggle and self-imposed isolation seem to’ve paid off better than any of his long distant friends could have ever expected. And with a suddenness that renders all of it immediately suspect, at that!

One of Allen’s said semi-estranged friends is Maddie (Pauline Chalamet), who dated him for about five seconds before moving on to his lightly douchey college roommate Ryan (James Morosini, who like Chalamet is also a vet of the series The Sex Lives of College Girls). Now engaged, Maddie and Ryan—along with their third-wheel stoner-slacker goofball friend Vic (Edy Modica from Jury Duty), one of those rare cinematic female stoner-slacker goofball friends—reach out to Allen to see how he’s been doing. But only after Allen’s mother reaches out to them first, worried after an extended period of radio silence emanating from her son.

Turns out that Allen’s not only doing fine—he’s thriving beyond anyone’s expectations. (Especially lightly douchey Ryan, who the film absolutely knows we the audience have no desire to identify with, thereby marking the first of many smart knots that the screenplay will twist us through against our will.) Buoyed by this sudden success, Allen invites the threesome to come visit him at his multi-million dollar mansion perched up above Los Angeles, the fresh reward of having sold a spec script to a publisher and the film rights for said spec script to a movie studio for an untold-of millions of dollars.

Lightly douchey Ryan is of course immediately suspicious, but so are Maddie and Vic—just they manage to couch it in concern and have less outward douchiness about it. But it doesn’t help that Allen’s acting hella weird from the moment he greets them—skittish, staring off into space for long periods of time, and deflecting their questions about the story he’s supposedly written that’s landed him this ginormous windfall, the threesome only become more intrigued the more that Allen brushes off their concerns. (Not to mention how much more outwardly hostile he becomes by their gentle pressing.)

So making like a halved Scooby gang, we set off with Maddie and Ryan and Vic to sneak through the thousands of doors this ridiculous mansion seems to have stretching unto infinity, poking our collective noses into places Allen would rather we all didn’t. Like the one room that’s a full on shrine to Allen’s favorite science-fiction author, the Roddenberry-ish S.J. Purcell (Brendan Hunt from Ted Lasso), which includes not just several enormous vintage outer space props but also a monitor that’s constantly screening Purcell’s sh**ty-looking 70s series The Neptune Cycle, which was adapted from his famous novels. What the hell’s the deal with all that? (There is a lot of this Star Trek rip-off slotted in between the film’s action, and gosh it’s weird how much of it seems to be echoing the events…) Or how about that great big circus-striped fumigation tent that’s parked in and taking up half of the driveway? Just so many weirdnesses piling up…

Naturally all of these mysteries will reveal answers and further mysteries beneath those, and far be it from me to spoil any of Terrestrial’s surprises. Pink has gifted us with a terrific little ride here though, thanks to his Trojan Horse of a script and especially to that truly winning lead turn from Fowler. His Allen swerves between pathetic and unhinged depending on the scene, and then depending on the replay of that scene a second or even a third time. nd all of that while somehow, rather inexplicably, remaining the character whose side we’re always on, even once he’s flown right off the deep end. After all, as we all keep telling ourselves, it’s not really us that’ve gone a little mad—it’s the world. Anyway Terrestrial is totally audacious in its miniature way, and makes for some clever and cunning and very funny filmmaking to untangle. A low-key otherworldly treat beamed in from one mad mad mad mad brain. Or is that two? Oh who’s even keeping track any more.