The Occupant has its world première at SXSW London, 4 June 2025
Hugo Keijzer’s feature debut The Occupant opens, aptly, with a literal entrance: the mouth of a cave. It will be a long while before we discover the significance of this cave, but the film’s very title already has us vaguely wondering who or what may be residing in it – and it might also call to mind Plato’s cave, that allegorical zone of delusion, denial and seductive simulacrum whose imprisoned occupants have their backs turned to reality.
Certainly British geologist Abby Brennan (Ella Balinska) is struggling to accept reality. Having already recently lost her mother, she is now watching her beloved sister Beth (Vanessa Ifedoria) succumb to terminal cancer. Yet Abby wants Beth to live for longer if not forever, and so ignores the advice of the hospice nurse (Sheena Kelly), of their father (Stuart Graham) and indeed of Beth herself to let nature run its course and to make the most of what little time remains. Instead, Abby determines, with characteristic single-mindedness, to put Beth into expensive, experimental, ethically questionable care that she believes will prolong her sister’s life. Yet unable to afford this treatment, Abby takes a dodgy but potentially lucrative assignment searching for valuable uranium deposits on the Russian border of Georgia – and so, in trying to save Beth, she also runs away from her.
This is the paradox at the heart of Abby’s conflicted identity. As a geologist, she is grounded in a rationalist, indeed materialist view of the world – and yet she is in pursuit of a miracle that seems, to everyone else, a quixotic fantasy that ignores home truths. In refusing to accept her sister’s, or anyone’s, mortality, and in relentlessly chasing a lost cause, Abby is clinging to something that essentially is not real – and all these themes will become crystallised when she first discovers a dark rock with very peculiar properties, and is then caught up in a freakish accident after what looks like a murmuration of out-of-place starlings brings down her transport helicopter in the “occupied territory” of South Ossetia.
With the co-pilot already dead and the pilot dying soon after, Abby must very quickly contend with her own helplessness in the face of mortal peril – a predicament that is intensified when she manages to make radio contact not with the authorities or a rescue party, but with the American pilot John (voiced by Rob Delaney) whose plane has crashed in a similar accident nearby, and who is in far worse shape than she is. With the odds and the elements stacked against her, Abby makes the rash choice to head off alone after John rather than in the opposite direction where she could get him help for both of them. Even John, injured and immobilised, is surprised by her decision, but as he says, “It’s your choice” – and indeed her misguided trek across snowy terrains and mountainous barriers in search of someone distant and dying both mirrors and reverses her decision to cross the continent for work that she hoped would save her sister back home. Abby’s icy odyssey is really all about her shifting relationship with her sister, and a much bigger choice that she must make between shooting for the impossible or embracing the inevitable.
Set in an environment (beautifully shot wide by cinematographer Robbie von Brussel) that overwhelms its solitary protagonist and shows her trying, quite literally, to scale the insurmountable or walking on thin ice, The Occupant will eventually return us to the cave with which it opened, and to the possibility, however illusory, of a sequestered, solipsistic life different from our mortal reality. For despite its initial realism, Keijzer’s film also draws on the materials of science fiction and fantasy to map out Abby’s lonely psychodrama – and it is sufficiently ambiguous in its structure that it remains unclear when, or even if ever, Abby leaves that subterranean place of rest and dreams and returns to the real world beyond.
Its closest analogues are A.T. White’s Starfish (2018) and Teresa Sutherland’s Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023), but The Occupant ventures off in its own directions and beats its own trails, while turning the human condition into wish-fulfilment theatre, projected like shadows on the Platonic wall. Yet even if the cruel, cold cosmos in which Abby finds herself does not significantly alter, and even if its eons of glacially-paced geological evolution put all our petty endeavours and short lives in their place, still the attitudes and choices of one solitary woman are seen to undergo a tectonic shift – and perhaps that change of mind makes all the difference in a world where we are only ever briefly observers and occupants.
strap: Hugo Keijzer’s sci-fi-ish debut feature traps a conflicted, isolated geologist between a rock and a hard place.
© Anton Bitel
