Assassinaut is a 2019 sci-fi thriller about a team of four children who travel to a different planet to save the president.
There’s nothing conventional in the works when if comes to writer and director Drew Bolduc, a filmmaker who isn’t so much steering away from traditional cinematic storytelling than straight-up heading the other direction powered by rocket fuel. His few films have been at best divisive, gruesome, violent, controversial and not in the least, experimental. Now comes his latest, Assassinaut, easily his most accomplished entry yet, an often troubling, darkly comedic effort that does as he seems so valiantly working hard to do, delivering a curious and cryptic piece of sci-fi weirdness.
Aliens have arrived and laid siege on the planet. In the United States, while some advocate a peace treaty, more powerful opposition violently reject the proposition and eventually resort to nuclear weapons to end the war. It works but leaves behind a swath of devastation and millions dead. A decade later, the president of Earth (Irene Santiago) is now living in space and the remaining aliens, along with a group of sympathizers, are regaining a foothold. In what some call a PR stunt, four children, including teenagers Sarah (Shannon Hutchinson), Charlie (Jasmina Parent), Brooke (Yael Haskal) and preteen Tom (Johnathan Newport) are selected to be the first to go into orbit and see the leader, but naturally, things take a bad turn when an assassin blows the station up, forcing the president to eject and the kids to follow, landing on a strange new planet where the kids set about trying to rescue her.
Bolduc doesn’t really play by the rules – though he certainly knows the game. Assassinaut seems immediately targeted for kids but then features some rather gruesome imagery (all of which are delightfully old school practical effects ripped right from a cheesy 80s late night flick), not to mention its adult themes of politics, survival, and well, the whole rest of it. It’s not for kids is what I’m saying. There are humorously grotesque and sometimes jarring visuals that are best defined as aggressively icky, with most of the action set on a distant world that looks surprisingly like the backwoods of the Adirondacks … stocked in bad fruit.
This leaves the children in the care of a guy named The Commander (Vito Trigo), hobbled by the crash who is ornery to say the least, a veteran scarred by his history and less than motivated to be a leader, soon afflicted by something … let’s call disturbing. We sort of follow them about the trees as they search for edible foods while little Tom ruffles everyone’s feathers and Sarah has visions of her mother (Jean Louise O’Sullivan). To get through this, the kids have to get a wee bit creative.
This style of moviemaking isn’t new of course, its roots traced back well into the 70s. Bolduc feels like a student of such rather than a cheap thief, crafting what seems designed as a low budget adaptation of an obscure comic book, his framing and dialogue minimal and selective, relying on movement rather than words to get his point across. It embraces the odd and unexpected with a kind of underlying menace that ever so slowly seeps its way to the surface until eventually it’s splattered all over the screen in a gooey finale.
You’re either a fan of this bare bones corn syrup blood fest or you’re not. Those that are see past the low-fi flare and enjoy the fun makeshift effects and commitment to the art (note things like the color-coded symbolism of the jumpsuits), riding it arms flailing down the rabbit hole. Assassinaut is exactly that, a brief but hypnotic jaunt through madness that earns points for its devotion and grins for its execution.