THE HIVE
Albie and Penny, a young couple with a failing marriage, try to rekindle the fire by having a night out by themselves. To make matters worse, the couple returns home to armed strangers. With no help from their neighbors or law enforcement, they attempt to get evidence of the intrusion. They’re captured by the intruders and tortured for information. There’s no hope until Albie escapes and saves Penny. So hellbent on revenge, he puts their marriage on the line. Unfortunately, all help has been compromised and there’s nowhere to run.
With a flailing marriage and erratic home invaders, THE HIVE has all the elements of a solid Twilight Zone-inspired feature. But this indie is more of a buzzkill.
The performances swing widely. The score, while fine on its own, doesn’t match the over-the-top portrayals of everyone beyond Penny and Albie. Even Timothy Haug and Christine Griffin give us lackluster chemistry.
The set is not a house in which two small children reside. While the script states they’ve only been in their new home for two weeks, there isn’t a single toy on the floor or family portrait on the mantle, just a couple of balls in the backyard. But, an array of greeting cards hang on shuddered closet doors. Nothing makes sense.
The plot is glaringly apparent to everyone but Albie and Penny. Once revealed an hour and ten minutes into the runtime, the fact that our invaders have to explain and then begin to bicker while the score ramps up its intensity, things get increasingly eye-roll-inducing. I think there is supposed to be some overarching social commentary, but the film lost me, somehow flipping from thriller to comedy, and I wasn’t sure if that was the film’s intent.
Despite the classic sci-fi concept, THE HIVE could have been a 15-minute short.
My little brother had that famous X-Files poster on his wall as a kid. The one that Mulder displayed in his office that read ‘I Want To Believe’. I have seen things that I cannot explain, both otherworldly and perhaps alien spacecraft related in my almost 40 years on Earth. All of that being said, Close Encounters Of The Fifth Kind would be better consumed as a series. There is a lot of information thrown at you, especially on the front end. While I was immediately suspect at the use of Fox News clips 4 times in the first 15 minutes, I was genuinely intrigued by information from Dr. Greer, founder of CSETI. As a total nerd myself, I am very familiar with this organization. My issues with the doc come in the very conspiratorial terms that get thrown at the audience. Not only that but also the complete shift in tone when Dr. Greer begins to explain how we are already communicating with beings from space. The videos of sightings and contact incidents are severely undermined by a distracting electronic soundtrack. It feels like an infomercial for one of Dr. Greer’s CE-5 workshops. I should be high on peyote in a yurt in Crestone. While you can see the passion behind what Dr. Greer is trying to communicate, the editing hurts the messaging. It takes what little we are given in way of video evidence and dumbs it down to YouTube-style nuttiness that you might run across on Reddit these days. I do encourage people to make their minds up for themselves as the new information does lead you to question life as we know it.
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