A father, two boys and a long night drive: Encounter borrows the shape of an alien-invasion thriller and folds it into an intimate family story.
What is Encounter about?
Somewhere in rural America, a decorated Marine collects his two young sons in the middle of the night and tells them to pack quickly and quietly. A non-human organism, he explains, has begun spreading through the population, and the only safe course is to get on the road and keep moving. The boys have not seen their father in a long while, and the sudden reunion lands somewhere between a rescue and an adventure. What follows is a cross-country journey that grows more hazardous by the hour. Motels, petrol stations and empty highways take on a menacing charge, and the older boy starts paying close attention to the gaps in his father's account of events. The trip demands far more from the two children than any camping holiday would, and by the time the road runs out they have been forced to shed a good deal of their childhood.
About the cast
Riz Ahmed heads the cast, with Octavia Spencer alongside him. Completing the ensemble are Lucian-River Mirage Chauhan, Aditya Geddada, Rory Cochrane, Janina Gavankar, Misha Collins and Keith Szarabajka. Much of the running time is spent in two- and three-person scenes, so the film leans heavily on the exchanges between the people sharing a car.
Context & significance
Encounter was directed by Michael Pearce and produced between the United Kingdom and the United States, arriving in 2021 as a sci-fi thriller running 108 minutes. Its genre label tells only part of the story. The film takes the machinery of an invasion picture, complete with talk of parasites and contamination, and points it at a small, fragile family unit instead of at cities or armies. Tension is built from confined spaces, a car interior, a motel room, a roadside diner, and from the way information reaches the audience through the eyes of two children. That approach places the picture alongside paranoid road thrillers as much as conventional science fiction.
Watching Encounter on Ktime
Encounter streams on K-Time with both a Persian dub and Persian subtitles. This page is free to read; to press play you need to log in with a K-Time account. The interface is built for Persian speakers, with Farsi menus and playback controls, and the film plays on phones, tablets, smart TVs and desktop browsers.