The Occupant

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.

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.

The Good The performance of the actors and the chosen locations were very acceptable

The Bad Dialogue moved from bland to dull

The Ugly The script and story held a lot of potential which was either abandoned or ignored. Then the major plot holes that were never addressed so you never were sure if a plot hole was an abandoned plot point or not. A major point was the distance that the MC travels was both inconsistent and impossible to cover in the time given.

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.