‘The Becomers’ review: the chaotic bodysnatchers movie 2023 demands

Have you heard the one about how aliens have infiltrated human society in order to take over Earth without us noticing? How they’ve slipped beneath the skin of all sorts of folks, from new mothers to famous politicians, and they are heck-bent on… uncovering the recipe for marmalade? Okay so Secret Invasion this ain’t. The Becomers, a sci-fi rom-com from Little Sister writer/director Zach Clark, feels like what Jim Jarmusch’s deadpan touch could do with a Body Snatchers remake.

Lowkey, lovely, and determinedly lo-fi, these aliens’ antics comment on the world they find themselves stumbling through, which just so happens to be the weird and wacky one modern-day Americans inhabit. And it does so by burying its sweet and tender romance under a good dollop of gross-out Cronenbergian body horror. There’s something here for everybody!

What’s The Becomers about?

Basically, it’s Body Snatchers told from the point of view of the Snatchers themselves. The Becomers has that 1980s fish-out-of-water vibe in which comedies like Cocoon and Splash traded. These slimy assimilators, once under the skin of their fresh human vessels, have some wacky catching up to do. And we watch them fail and flail as they keep getting it wrong, immersed in situations that they weren’t quite expecting. 

Putting the fluid in “gender fluid,” the routine goes like this: the aliens drop down from the skies via their little pink whirligig spacecraft, and they liquefy whatever unlucky person they cross paths with, quickly adopting their visage through, you know, science or whatever. The movie really doesn’t get too hung up on the particulars, and neither should you. Some very brief backstory lays out the dying planet that they’ve come from, but The Becomers is more concerned with the directly here and right now – with the weirdness of these weirdos continually finding themselves to be the least weird ones in the room.

So, after landing their spacecraft in the woods just off the highway, our primary alien (names aren’t really a thing in this story) first slips into the roadworker who saw their ship land. But he’s no good – the alien needs a vehicle to be mobile. And what luck, there’s a young woman pulled over on the side of the road just ahead. The fact that she’s pulled over because she’s actively giving birth is only a brief distraction that the alien doesn’t seem too concerned with. They’ve got places to be, and babies can be dispatched easily enough. 

The problem is that every human being that the alien takes over also had places to be. They had lives that they were in the middle of leading when they were so rudely interrupted by all this extraterrestrial chicanery. And aye that’ll be the rub as our alien steps into each person’s shoes for however long they’re in there, trying to pass as human. Clark mines great tension and even greater humor from each too-close-for-comfort encounter, as the alien is forced to find out what kind of person they’re inhabiting, and what kind of awful skeletons they’ve got in their closets…or basements.

There’s a dark but giddy humor as the alien tries on fresh bodies like the shopping spree scene from Pretty Woman. The Becomers becomes episodic as its space invaders strive to find that perfect fit, skin by skin. We never realized how lucky Julia Roberts was that she didn’t have to vomit acid onto every Louboutin that was too big or small in order to dissolve its carcass. Not until now, anyway! That would’ve been a very different movie. It would have been this one, in fact.

Acid baths aside, every night, no matter how outrageous the circumstances that they find themselves in, the alien goes outdoors and calls out a strange sound into the darkness. A sort of music, which we eventually find out is the alien’s version of Daniel Day-Lewis’ “I will find you!” speech from The Last of the Mohicans. Because it turns out that the alien’s life partner is also out there somewhere amongst humanity, in some random human form as well – also wandering, also looking for their partner in return. 

Separated by unimaginable distances and events beyond our pea-brained comprehension, it turns out that all these interstellar lifeforms are looking for is their one true love. Everybody together now – awww!

The Becomers‘ extraterrestrials are so extra.

But this is hardly a re-do of the heteronormative Earth Girls Are Easy. Not when gender is utterly meaningless to this species, who insist on retaining a moist, leaking side-hole on their human-seeming exteriors. One where all sorts of gunky sexual shenanigans will go down, and eventually gifting us with what might be the weirdest sex scene on-screen since Team America.

Once our literally star-crossed lovers finally do get reunited, the longest passage of the film finds our lead alien taking on the form of Little Sister actress Molly Plunk (a singular delight who profoundly gets the assignment), while her lover is first played by Jacquelyn Haas and then by Mike Lopez (All Jacked Up and Full of Worms) as their bodies betray them through a series of mishaps. But even as the bodies and actors and side-holes keep changing, we keep track of who’s who because one alien’s eyes glow pink while the other’s glow blue – no doubt another sly nod toward the deconstruction of gender constructs always scribbling in the film’s margins.

But as queer as the body snatchers and their acid-barfing escapades are, nothing quite prepares them for the queerness of humanity itself. As the aliens find and lose and find one another over and over again, we become witness to how truly outlandish our own proclivities would seem when viewed from slightly askance. 

Across the last act, as politics and cults and Facebook-radicalized suburbanite Satanists start inching into the frame, it becomes clear that this is a satire of our truly absurd moment as much as the 1956 Body Snatchers movie was a lacerating takedown of McCarthyism. Each generation gets the Body Snatchers it deserves, and 2023 deserves chaos. The Becomers brings it in buckets.

The Becomers was reviewed out of Fantasia International Film Festival 2023.