The Occupant

Firstly, if you're looking for a sci-fi movie, this isn't one. I'm bewildered why it would be marketed as such. If anything, it's a wilderness survival movie, where every calamity that occurs is a result of the character making immensely dumb decisions. It's a movie that deals with guilt and mourning; but for no coherent reason and in a completely over-the-top manner.

Without giving spoilers, the movie is essentially just a string of glaring plot holes linked together with over-acting, ludicrously 'tense' music, and ridiculously inappropriate sentimentality. It's completely incoherent, and that does nothing to engage the viewer.

This is a huge miss. Don't waste 105 minutes on it.

Abby (Ella Balinska) is a British Geologist who has been working around the world for months in a row. She desperately needs the money to pay for her dying sister's (Vanessa Ifediora) medical treatment. But now, when she's finally on her way home, her helicopter crashes, killing the pilot. Abby finds herself stranded and alone in an icy wilderness, where a mysterious helper may or may not be her salvation.

This starts off a little like "Long Distance" where 2 astronauts crash land on an alien planet are trying to meet each other using just radio chatter.

It's also reminiscent of "Keep Breathing" where a woman has to survive after a plane crash in a mountain region.

However it is nowhere near as good as either film. Balinska puts in a fine performance in terms of acting. But the film has no point and no flow and the story is mired in obscure dreams and flashbacks. I did try hard to follow it but I stopped short of googling to make sense of it. If a film can't tell you a story in the screenplay, it's not a very good film anyway.

I rated it a 4 and that was solely for Balinskas acting.

Without knowing a single thing about the movie, as I stumbled upon it by random chance, I still opted to watch it and check what director Hugo Keijzer had to offer.

Writers Philip Michael Howe, Hugo Keijzer, Roelof Jan Minneboo and Xiao Tang put together an okay enough script. However, the narrative does struggle a bit with the pacing. Now, there was a lot of potential to "The Occupant", but ultimately the writers didn't fully deliver on that potential.

I literally wasn't familiar with a single actress or actor on the cast list. But that was actually something that spoke in favor of the overall impression of the movie, as I do enjoy watching unfamiliar and new talents on the screen.

The movie does have a lot of nice visual shots, which definitely helped establish the atmosphere and mood of the movie.

"The Occupant" certainly is a watchable movie, but hardly one that I would recommend you to rush out and get to watch. Nor is it a movie that warrants more than a single viewing.

My rating of director Hugo Keijzer's 2025 movie "The Occupant" lands on a generous four out of ten stars.

I went into The Occupant (2025) completely blind - no trailer, no synopsis, no expectations. Unfortunately, it didn't matter. What followed was a dull, lifeless experience. The film clearly wants to be clever and cerebral, but instead it's painfully slow, uneventful, and lacking in any real tension or payoff.

This is a weird movie. It felt to me like it was more of a vanity project than a movie made to entertain or make a profit. Its full of long picturesque shots of great scenery, snow, forest, and rock formations, but without much substance or any real depth. The misleading title bares little relevance to whats on offer, and the story is an odd combination of two notions that meld rather poorly.

It's a story essentially of loss, dealing with it and the pain of losing close emotional attachement. Unfortunately, the movie does this by meandering along a path that gets boring quickly and deludes into thinking theres going to be some sort of payoff somewhere, but sadly there isn't any.

The majority if of the movie is spent following our stunningly beautiful lead Ella Balinska as she treks across the wilderness. Very little happens, there's very little development save the flashbacks to her homelife and the short insights were given to her character.

To be fair it's not a terrible movie if you have almost two hours to spare. You could do worse, but its certainly not a good movie, less so an entertaining one. The begining suggests that there was a sci-fi themed thread at play, but this never really pans out. Even though the prelude did seem initially interesting, I was bored twenty minutes in, and this didn't really improve throughout the one hour and forty minute produciton.

There's only a handful of roles on offer here, and essentially the whole movie rests on the shoulders of one actor, Balinska, who to to be fair, gives a pretty solid performance, but it just isn't enough. The tale is a threadbare offering too long, and too abstract.

There is nothing of interest, no payoff and its not even an interesting watch.

In all honesty my advise is to give this one a miss. I don't like to be overly critical with my reviews but there just isn't anything on offer here.

3/10 is all I can manage.