OUTFEST LA 2022: Misery Loves Company in ‘Unidentified Objects’

In his directorial debut, Juan Felipe Zuleta’s Unidentified Objects shines intensely as the forthcoming U.S. Centerpiece film at Outfest LA Film Festival 2022. Additionally written by Leland Frankel, Unidentified Objects is about an absolute curmudgeon, Peter (Matthew Jeffers—also debuting here), who is woken from his sleep by his neighbor Winona (Sarah Hay) and brought on a misadventures road trip to Canada.

Unidentified Objects is a classic road trip movie, and you know what? The classics work. We open on Peter, who simply could not be bothered to think about anybody besides himself for a fraction of a second. His neighbor, Winona, whom he has never met, is asking to borrow his car and being rather coy about it. Rather than shoo her away like a true curmudgeon, though, he agrees on the condition that he comes too because of business nearby he happens to need to attend to as well.

Instantly I’m enraptured by both Peter and Winona as well as their odd coupling. Peter is so, so angry. And Winona is nervous about her appointment with alien destiny awaiting her in Canada, but she’s also Peter’s complete foil with a wholly nonchalant attitude about most everything else. You know that surely over time, they’ll grow on one another, which lets Peter’s less appealing qualities feel less abrasive from the get. You just can’t help but love him despite how cruel and offputting he can be because you know underneath his layers of trauma is somebody soft and vulnerable.

Jeffers does a phenomenal job of imbuing his character with all of the range of emotions an egotistic man with a massive chip on his shoulder would possess. He feels like the weight of the universe is on his shoulder at all times—a self-described circle, inside a circle, inside a circle as a chronically ill, gay, little person. Peter acts like the whole world is constantly out to get him, which surely it often is, and both the anguish and self-aggrandizing are so well managed. It never makes him the least bit unlikable, yet he’s totally loathsome.

Winona, meanwhile, is everything that Peter isn’t. The world has dealt her plenty of poor hands, but Hay plays her like none of it matters in the scheme of things. Where Peter believes the world is constantly out to get him for the ways he’s different, Winona is comfortable with herself. She doesn’t moralize the qualities that make her stand out the way Peter assumes everyone does about him. It’s a really strong pairing on paper, but truly, it’s the way the two build off each other with constantly snowballing emotion that sells their entire journey together.

This is a magnificent journey at that. Not only because they meet such interesting people along the way. And not only because Peter goes through a number of fantastical sequences that mess with your perception of reality, each in unique ways. But because through it, the main theme of exploration is about discerning how much the world owes you and how much you owe yourself to wrest what you deserve out of the world of your own volition. Not to say it’s a movie about finding self-empowerment; I think that might be a bit patronizing. Rather, as reflected by its alien-seeking main plot, it’s about finding a balance between the reality of what we must face and the boundaries of that reality that we can push and bend to our will.

There is one shot where the saturation seemed quite off as we get a beautiful view of an open sky, but for every other frame, we get beautiful visuals. There are gorgeous fields and moderately bold colors. There is one crucial moment at the very end that is not particularly well enough lit to carry the emotion of the moment, but it’s suddenly exceptionally lit moments later, nearly, but not entirely, canceling out my frustration with the former. Other scenes, though, especially in the most intense physical acting moments for Jeffers, of which there are several, use light to highlight this excellent physicality as well as add uncertainty to the reality of circumstances.

Also, on the technical side of things, the soundtrack is excellent, with earworms and a balance of familiar and unfamiliar songs that befit every moment just right. The recurring classic alien whirring sound is always excellently timed to come in just when it’s needed to give relief between the growing tension of certain scenes and what follows.

The journey of Peter from the beginning to the end of Unidentified Objects is excellent. And while he is the focal point of the movie, his foil in Winona is much of where the movie’s heart endures. Together, they make for an instantly lovable pair, and on their own, each actor brings an incredible physical and emotional performance, especially Jeffers. It’s a fantastic deconstruction of aggrievement and self-aggrandizement, and where we might find a balancing point between them to find fulfillment.

Unidentified Objects is featuring at Outfest LA Film Festival in person on July 20th and digitally July 21-23rd.