A rising sci-fi author welcomes three college friends to his home, but strange events begin to blur the lines between reality and imagination.
Grimmfest says: The synopsis might seem to suggests a scenario similar to that of last year’s hauntingly hallucinogenic and deliberately disorientating mash up of speculative sci-fi and discomforting domestic comedy, I SEE THE DEMON. But while TERRESTRIAL has a similarly sharp eye for social awkwardness, in every other respect it really could not be more different. A elegantly structured, morally slippery and unexpectedly brutal blackly comic crime conundrum about an obsessive wannabe sci-fi writer whose dreams of success go wildly and violently awry, culminating in violence and mental melt-down, it’s a savage skewering of creative delusion, the psychopathic entitlement of toxic nerd culture, and a macabre meditation on Adela Rogers St. Johns’ oft-revisited question, What Price Hollywood? If the film does call to mind any Grimmfest hit of previous years, it’s Adam Randall’s I SEE YOU (2019), wherein the unsettling strangeness of the opening act is explained by a perception shifting big reveal at the halfway point that forces the viewer to reassess and rethink everything seen thus far. Director Steve Pink is best known for the HOT TUB TIME MACHINE movies, but he started out as a screenwriter, making his name with the cult classic hitman-at-a-high-school-reunion crime comedy, GROSSE POINTE BLANK, and this has some of that film’s dark sense of mischief and jarring narrative unpredictability (even though he didn’t actually write it). And an ending that proves far darker and more malevolently meanspirited than the film’s previous lightness of tone has prepared the way for. And the glimpses of the cheesy sci-fi movies the protagonist is so obsessed with are the icing on the cake, an indication of the frightening levels of delusion that are driving him.