This is because Assimilate came with a 96% rating for me, and boy, was it ever not close to 96%. It’s sloppily-constructed, derivative trash.
We begin with a prologue of sorts, in which a young woman is attempting to contact her mother via cellphone, but can’t get her mother to pick up. Outside, human figures howl and shriek and run past her windows. The young woman is panicked, probably because of all the howling and shrieking, and eventually the figures break in and come for her. Apart from possibly giving away the ending, in some tenuous way. this sequence has no connection to the rest of the film. It’s never mentioned or referenced again.
Cut immediately to morning in a small Missouri town, and a close-up on some leaves that have odd little bugs crawling all over them. But never mind that, let’s meet our protagonists! Zach and Randy are budding content creators who - thanks to Zach’s nebulously-defined skills with technology and Randy’s frankly obnoxious personality - are starting a web series about what life in a small Missouri town is really like. Mostly this seems to consist of them wandering around town, striking up highly artificial conversations with people they know while conspicuously pointing buttonhole spy cams at them in an utterly failed attempt to be covert. What this means for the film is that we periodically get shots from the point of view of these little cameras, but not in any way that makes sense or communicates a specific point of view. It seems to just be there as a pretext for some quasi-found-footage imagery, but the end result is more confusing than anything else.
But, anyway, Zach and Randy and then Kayla. Zach is secretly sweet on Kayla but they’ve been friends for years, so Randy keeps urging Zach to do something about it and Zach keeps being reluctant. Kayla’s got a little brother named Joey, and Joey’s just sort of there. There’s the town’s pastor, who is just as awkwardly chummy as you’d expect the town’s pastor to be, there’s the sheriff, and there’s a neighbor lady who is sort of a free spirit. Just another day in small-town Missouri.
At least, until mysterious insect bites start causing people to act…not like themselves.
But for a film like this to work. there needs to be a gradual escalation of tension and stakes. You start with little things - people acting out of sorts in small ways, or having odd things happen in the background. The scope, extent, and nature of the problem is revealed gradually, so that by the time the protagonists realize what’s going on - how big it is, how deep it goes, and how utterly alien and sinister its origins - it’s close to too late. Zombies are scary (if they still are at all) because they look just human enough for us to want to respond to them as human, but corrupted and wrong enough that we know that we shouldn’t. It’s the same sort of thing in body-snatcher films, whether it’s the extraterrestrials of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers or the androids of The Stepford Wives, it’s discomfiting to see familiar faces gone completely flat and blank. And unlike zombie films, there’s some kind of organizing intelligence behind it all, which makes it even more sinister.
See, that’s what you want to do if you want to make it a good film. What you don't do, is what the filmmakers did here. First, the film doesn’t really ever establish a tone. From the opening prologue onward, the filmmakers just sort of fling events at the screen in sequence. Hey, here’s a woman being threatened! Now here’s a small town somewhere else! These two guys are wacky! Now someone’s gotten bitten by a bug! Now everyone in town is acting strangely all of a sudden! The tone shifts on a dime - one moment, the abovementioned neighbor is getting bit by some mysterious insect, and then all of a sudden all of the major figures in town are gathering in the church basement at night out of nowhere. There’s no gradual sense of escalation, no shift from one person to another, just everything’s fine and then suddenly it isn’t. This means there’s no menace or paranoia to it. Body-snatcher movies need some kind of baseline - it’s hard to establish that things aren’t normal unless you know what normal looks like, and this movie doesn’t bother with normal. It just goes from zero to “everything’s weird” in a matter of minutes, like it knows what beats it needs to hit, but entirely ignores the idea that you need space between those beats to set them up.
The other thing body-snatcher films rely on is the reveal of the threat’s nature, when the things that look like your friends and loved ones and neighbors and authorities are revealed to be shells for something…other. It’s another way it’s similar to zombie films, except with zombie films the tension is between the roughly human characteristics and the obvious monstrosity. Like, that person is our friend, but somehow that makes seeing them with half of their face missing as they shamble towards us even worse. In the body-snatcher film, they may be acting strangely, but they still look just like our friend, and it’s when the façade is torn away that the real horror comes in. In this film, the potential for body horror is, with a couple of exceptions, largely unexplored - mostly it’s just actors staring blankly, which isn’t all that strange or unsettling by itself given how little we get to know any of these people beforehand. For all we know, this is just how they are.
I think some of this is explainable in terms of budget. This film was obviously made on the cheaper side, with production values hovering around mid-tier made-for-TV-movie levels, to match the acting, both broad and wooden at the same time. There are lots of shots of little bugs swarming everywhere, but also these intercuts of cheap-looking, digitally generated spores floating through the air for...reasons? Late in the film, we get a couple of looks at the creatures responsible, and they’re pretty obvious digital effects. At one point, our protagonists discover a pod with a newly-hatched version of one character’s mother in it, but that’s about it, and you get the sense it’s because they didn’t have the money to create more pods and related practical effects. I’m not going to condemn a film just for being made on the cheap (Night of the Living Dead was shot on a shoestring, and it’s a stone classic), or equate the presence of elaborate effects with quality, but in this instance, the shoddiness and paucity of effects work at a point in the film where the nature of the threat is being revealed ends up calling attention to itself. Effects work needs to be believable, and it needs to communicate something other than “we could only afford one shot like this.” It’s no sin to work cheap, but overreach or lack of imagination can undo a lot of what you’re trying to accomplish.
The result is a massive disappointment. Numerous jump scares don’t substitute for dread or unease, there’s no cohesive story, just all of a sudden everyone starts acting strangely and only our protagonists know the truth. It culminates in a siege different from any number of zombie movies only in that you need to do a lot less makeup work when the conceit is “clones” instead of “zombies.” Well, it feels like it should culminate with that siege, but there’s still too much movie to go after that. From a pacing standpoint, it peaks too early and then lingers too long . Everything is obvious, everything is foregrounded, there’s no tension, it meanders, and is so transparent in its intent as to be almost insulting. I hate reducing my evaluation of a film to “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” but goddamn, if it means Netflix doesn’t recommend any more stinkers like this, I’ve got thumbs for days.
IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
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