This speculative film documents “man’s first-ever encounter with intelligent life from outer space,” and shows international experts scrambling to manage a close encounter. Academics, theologians, defense ministers, and even the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs desperately draft responses and devise protocol. Following 2010’s Into Eternity (about nuclear waste burial), Michael Madsen returns to themes of gargantuan scope. He constructs exquisitely composed, classically balanced sequences with haunting shots of sculpture, foliage, frozen crowds, and mobilizing special forces. As the film progresses, these everyday moments increasingly seem foreign, even alien. Music, from pulsing synthesizers to cinema standbys Strauss and Arvo Pärt, heightens the suspense and strangeness. When, in voice-over, Madsen asks the alien “Will we ever understand you?” it’s clear that this is a question for us all. (DF)