At SXSW, The Aliens Are Already Here

There was a surprising pattern that emerged from the buzziest sci-fi movies that premiered at this year’s SXSW Film & TV Festival: the alien invasion isn’t coming, it’s already long over. There’s no battening down the hatches or sending Will Smith up in a fighter jet to welcome aliens to Earth, it’s about dealing with the fact that aliens live among us, and might be possessing your friends and family as you speak.

It’s a fascinating pattern to emerge from in 2025 indie sci-fi, one that could maybe speak to a more cynical shift in the genre going forward… Or maybe it’s just easier for movies of a certain budget to make movies about alien possession.

The Astronaut

Kate Mara stars in a sci-fi horror film written and directed by Jess Varley as a NASA astronaut who returns from her first space mission with a strange bruise and a creeping paranoia that she brought something back with her. As her recovery team monitors her, she’s moved to an isolated safe house in the backwoods of Virginia — the perfect place for her to start to notice a strange shadow stalking her from the woods.

The film unfolds slowly, with mounting tension and a healthy amount of dread, with Varley proving to be an astute student of horror. But Varley also proves to be too eager a student of Steven Spielberg, with The Astronaut making a baffling tonal switch in its final act with a twist that can only be described as “what if Jurassic Park became E.T.” The film ends on a strangely whimsical note, which undercuts the great moody horror that the film was so carefully building at the beginning. The Astronaut is ultimately a film felled by its own ambitions, despite the promise of its early concept of alien-invasion-as-home-invasion horror film.

Astronaut premiered March 7 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival. It does not yet have a distributor or general release date.

Descendent

In writer-director Peter Cilella’s mesmerizing alien abduction movie Descendent, the alien abduction may not have happened at all. The film follows Sean Bruner (Ross Marquand), a school security guard whose wife is about to give birth to their first child. But while fixing a flickering light on the school roof at night, he is blinded by a sudden beam of light and falls off the roof. The incident triggers a new set of skills in Sean — suddenly he has an advanced artistic ability, and his hearing has been heightened — and also triggers the memory of a childhood trauma surrounding his father, who committed suicide when he was young.

Descendent is a bit of a head-scratcher, playing with our sense of reality and dream as Sean’s own grip on reality begins to loosen. Did he actually get abducted? Or did a head injury trigger a physical transformation that caused him to lose himself just before he became a father? Is Sean just repeating the same mistake his own father did? Descendent often plays things a bit too ambiguously, Marquand plays a great man-on-the-edge, while Ciella delicately toys with our expectations for alien-abduction movies while exploring grander themes of generational trauma.

Descendent premiered March 10 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival. It was acquired by RLJE Films. A general release date has not be announced.

The Infinite Husk

Existential dread is the name of the game in The Infinite Husk, a heady sci-fi film from writer-director Aaron Silverstein. The Infinite Husk is a little different from the other sci-fi movies at this year’s SXSW, in that this one is from the point of view of the alien consciousness inhabiting human bodies. Vel (an excellent Peace Ikediuba) is one such alien, exiled to Earth for some unknown reason and put on a mission to find and observe one of her fellow exiles. But as she jumps from body to body — what they call “husks” — she begins to develop a strange attachment to the flimsy little human shells, and what little life they have. (Trek fans will recognize this classic set-up from the 2005 Enterprise episode, “Observer Effect.”)

The Infinite Husk is slow and a little stilted, but intentionally so. There’s an endearing quality to its shagginess, that feeds the fish-out-of-water tale of Vel, as she navigates the lonely sprawl of contemporary Los Angeles. The film’s ideas are sometimes a bit too big for it to handle, but it’s an impressively high-concept premise done on a low budget and has a strong, albeit bleak, worldview that carries it through to its bitter end.

The Infinite Husk premiered March 10 at the SXSW Film & TV Festival. It does not yet have a distributor or general release date.