Living Among Us

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Elleanor (Esme Bianco, simmering with anger and dignity as her guests air their misconceptions about her family) and Andrew (a powerfully touching swansong for John Heard) are a respectable, polite if traditional couple.

A week later, and I’m in Rainton Meadows Nature Reserve with Durham Wildlife Trust’s Young Rangers to collect some wildflower seeds to sow. For instance, veterans William Sadler and John Heard fare better at appearing in the moment while Thomas Ian Nicholas and Andrew Keegan look locked into “off book” autopilot.The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program has been sampling rocks from the seabed to a depth approaching one kilometer, in part to explore their microbial content. Of course we know there’s going to be a darker truth, and this film delivers everything we want from it with twists that stop it ever being quite what we expect. At first this idea might seem preposterous; if alien organisms thrived right under our noses (or even in our noses), would not scientists have discovered them already?

Everything is delightfully stilted and awkward so as to very clearly telegraph to the audience that somethin’ ain’t right.If alternative life had a distinctively different metabolism, say, it might have altered rocks or created mineral deposits in a way that cannot be explained by the activities of known organisms. When one of them becomes unresponsively poorly you’d think they’d take them out of the situation and find medical attention? Many have already succeeded in taking their lives, leaving their loved ones behind with a life sentence of grief, birthdays, anniversaries, Christmases, weddings, and children and grandchildren born without them there.

The laws of chemistry, however, are blind to left and right, so if life started again from scratch, there would be a 50–50 chance that its building blocks would be molecules of the opposite handedness. His double-act with his almost silent brother Selvin (Chad Todhunter) gives a sinister and gruesomely funny reminder of the presence of a bloodier story in the background, and William Sadler’s supporting role as Samuel, the vampire’s sect leader, looms over the action so that even when nothing too bad is happening we never lose faith that it will.Because of this dependence, viruses cannot be considered an alternative form of life, nor is there any evidence that they stem from an independent origin. But they’re a professional team and hey, they’ve recorded cannibals and lived to tell the tale to the world. Here we see an approach to the idea that is refreshingly grounded as it explores such questions as “Where would vampires get their blood if they were living legit? Though the vampire genre has been beaten like a dead horse, when I saw this trailer, I thought maybe I’d be pleasantly surprised with a new twist. Some of these unfamiliar amino acids might make suitable building blocks for alternative forms of life.