The Gracefield Incident

Debris from an alien spacecraft crashes into the woods surrounding the cabin of an obsessive bigfoot hunter. The 'Squatch half of that promising mashup gets almost entirely ignored in Mathieu Ratthe's debut feature, The Gracefield Incident, which is often more concerned with how the thriller's "found footage" is being recorded than what it's about. Not that the how isn't an interesting gimmick: A year after a car accident, video-game designer Matt (Ratthe also stars) has outfitted his prosthetic eye with a cell-phone camera. For coverage, we're also introduced to a friend who just bought new photo gear, and there's some sort of electromagnetic event that (conveniently) causes everyone's cell phones to be stuck in video mode.

After the cameras are accounted for, what about the characters? It's pretty thin. There's Matt's wife, Jessica (Kimberly Laferriere), who lost her baby in the accident and is eager to try again. But a mysterious creature is stalking the couple and their four friends, drawing its victims into the sky while leaving their clothes behind (scattered garments being cheaper than strewn gore). The friends register less as characters than as crew, manning shakycams as Ratthe stumbles around in the dark, conveying panic, confusion and determination in largely the same shouted tones.