The Gulf of Silence (2020)

directed by M.K. Rhodes

USA

85 minutes

4.5 stars out of 5

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I've always loved UFO documentaries. There's something deeply ingrained in my childhood about them, about buying hefty multi-DVD box sets put out by supposedly "reputable" sources like the History Channel and watching them over and over, and then later, gravitating towards the more crackpot-oriented ones, partly for fun, partly because the over-produced television specials where people mostly just trotted out the same things we already knew about Roswell and Area 51 no longer satisfied. A mainstay of these documentaries was the supposed inside source, of which there are, in comparison to the pool of people who claim to have been abducted or contacted by aliens, relatively few. Not a lot of people are out there pretending to have shirked their NDAs and abdicated from a secret research facility somewhere because there are Things the Public Must Know. Even though the veracity of these claims is always and will probably always be unprovable- the government has yet to step in and rally support behind the likes of Bob Lazar, and most likely will never do so- there's always the possibility that at least one of them knows at least some of the truth.

The Gulf of Silence is dedicated to this idea. It is, it should be stated, a pseudo-documentary: the actress playing Dr. Laura Gale is really named Mandy May Cheetham, and none of the things she claims about herself track with any real person. But there is a shred of truth, like any good fable: undisputed, publicly-acknowledged UFO videos are shown that are the closest thing we currently have to, if not footage of extraterrestrials, then footage of something that we can't identify. Cheetham, as Gale, speaks with a clarity that has a jadedness beneath it but also a great earnestness, as if she knows- and judging by how she speaks of her time on the convention circuit, she does know- how she's going to come off, claiming the things she's claiming. But her claims never become outlandish, and she speaks about them with the same factual tone she uses to introduce herself at the beginning. The film never feels like an accusation, it doesn't take the goading approach many contactees do, framing themselves as martyrs who just want the truth. And in fairness, the film also doesn't ever feel entirely like reality; the script is too obvious and the way Cheetham delivers it too practiced, but this doesn't have to be a detriment to its believability. Cheetham could easily be imagined to be Gale's stand-in, hired to read her words in order to keep the real woman as close to anonymity as possible.

There's something about this that feels bigger than a pseudo-documentary, though, which is why the obvious fakeness of it doesn't feel like it takes away from its overall quality. I'm not entirely sure what it is that makes The Gulf of Silence feel so... monumental. Maybe it's how easily I am drawn in by someone looking "me" (or the camera) in the eye and telling me an extremely compelling tale that they claim to have witnessed firsthand. Maybe the seed was already in me from how interested I am in UFO documentaries and secret government conspiracies surrounding aliens. But the point here doesn't feel like it's supposed to be "this is fake but I made it look real". It's not a found-footage movie, it's no Blair Witch. It's just... something. It's something new and fascinating and I love it.

Something about it is also deeply frightening at times- maybe it's the music (created, as was literally everything else, by M.K. Rhodes), which has a foreboding aura, like it's gearing you up for something bad to happen. Whatever it was, that story Gale tells about first contact in the Bering Strait is genuinely one of the scariest things I've heard in a long time and it made me feel uneasy being alone in my own house. Again, though, this isn't the point- although for me, who is as much a fan of getting scared by movies as I am of UFO movies, it's an excellent treat.

It was December 30th when I watched this film, it's December 31st when I'm writing this, and it'll probably be 2021 by the time anyone reads it, if anyone reads it, but I'm still considering this one of the best movies of 2020. All the time, I'm reminded of a tweet I saw in the middle of this year beseeching us all to remember, later, when we are vaccinated and back to some semblance of normalcy, that it was artists that got us through this. That we turned to art when we had to turn away from the rest of the world. There's always going to be things I stumble across like The Gulf of Silence that remind me that there's an infinite wellspring of new ideas and new possibilities, and people like M.K. Rhodes find that wellspring and bring from it things that inspire me to keep an open mind- towards art and towards the world at large.