There are movies that pull you in and hold you tight. There are movies that keep you at a distance no matter how hard you try to connect. The Occupant manages to be both at once. It is the strange feeling of being locked to the screen while your mind keeps tugging at loose threads that never quite tie together. You sit forward because the lead actor is doing something that feels raw and honest. You sit back because the story keeps shrugging when you ask what any of this means. That tension is the whole experience. It is maddening and weirdly compelling.
Ella Balinska is the reason you stay. She carries the film on her shoulders from the first frame to the last. The camera does not leave her for long. It rarely seems to leave her at all. She plays Abby, a young woman who will do anything to save her sister. Beth is dying. There is an experimental treatment that might give her a chance. There is not enough money. Abby’s father wants her to face the reality of what is coming, to prepare for the worst, to be there as a family. Abby refuses to accept that. She makes a desperate choice. She takes a job at a uranium mine in the country of Georgia, far from home, far from any safety net. It pays fast. It pays enough. It is a long shot that feels like the only shot.
If the movie really dug into that choice, it might have been an entirely different story. There is a version of this tale where we spend half an hour with Abby at home, in hospital rooms, at the kitchen table listening to the clatter of forks and the slow heavy talk of a household bracing for loss. There is a version where we get to see the mine as a place with people and routine and danger. The Occupant is not that version. It brushes past the home life. It skips along the surface of the mine. Before we have found our footing, the plot throws Abby into a survival scenario that never lets up. The result is that we know her in the way you know someone only through crisis. We find out who she is not from long conversations but from the way she moves when the ground gives way beneath her.
The turning point arrives in an instant. A helicopter that is supposed to bring her away from the isolated outpost drops from the sky. The crash sequence is chaotic and icy and loud. When the snow settles, she is alone. A blinding plain stretches out in every direction. Eastern Europe looks like the edge of the world here. You can almost taste the cold through the screen. She is battered and stunned and has to move or die. The film finds a real pulse in these moments. Every breath puffs into the air. Every step could be a mistake. It is stripped down survival cinema and it works on a simple level. You worry for her because Balinska sells the physical strain. Her face goes from determination to fear to a kind of quiet disbelief that anyone can be expected to do this.
She finds a radio. This might be her first real piece of luck, and it is not simple good fortune at all. A voice answers. The man calls himself John. He says he is trapped a few miles away. He sounds like he knows what he is doing. He sounds like he might care. He is played by Rob Delaney, and he makes a meal out of a voice and a handful of phrases and pauses. The two of them start to talk. They make a plan. Maybe they can meet somewhere in the snow. Maybe together they can make it out.
From the first few exchanges, something feels off. It is not that John is obviously lying. It is the way he answers things. The tiny delays. The way he steers her choices while pretending to be gentle about it. It is hard to explain but easy to feel. This is where The Occupant leans into unease. Abby has no one else to turn to. We as viewers want her to grab any lifeline. The movie wants us to grip the rope and then look closer at the frayed threads.
Then the story drifts toward something stranger. Abby finds an object in the snow. It is a small stone that does not belong here, the kind of thing you could toss in your pocket and forget, except that it hums with implication. The film nudges it into the frame again and again. It starts to feel like the key to a door, or maybe the door itself. This is where The Occupant courts science fiction without spelling out any rules. Time and memory slip around Abby. She sees flashes of what might be the past. She questions where she is and when she is. She wonders if she is even alive. The radio voice becomes a guide and a threat. The snow is not just a place anymore. It is a state of mind, or a metaphor, or a purgatory.
This is also where the movie may lose people. It is one thing to invite mystery. It is another to flatten the difference between mystery and muddle. The Occupant often refuses to choose. It wants the primal pulse of a survival story. It wants the intimate ache of a family drama. It wants the cerebral spark of a speculative fable. Those ingredients can work together, and many good films have baked them into something delicious. Here they sit side by side on the plate. You taste each separately, and you wish the cook had stirred more.
Balinska keeps stirring, though. Her performance is all action and reaction, muscles and breath and heartbreak. She convinces you that snow burns. She convinces you that a hand radio can feel like a friend. She convinces you that the idea of missing your sister’s final hours is worse than frostbite. That last part is the pow of the movie. It makes the fear of nature personal. If Abby does not make it back, she will not get to say goodbye. The film returns to her memories of Beth in clipped flashes. You do not get all the details, but you get the love. You get the stubborn hope. You get the grief already forming like ice on the edges of everything.
It is frustrating that the script does not trust the straightforward version of this story. The writing is constantly ducking away from clarity. It hides behind questions that never get satisfying answers. Is John a rescuer or a predator. Is he even there. Is the bureau that hired her telling the truth. Did she really travel to Georgia or is this some limbo that looks like Georgia. The stone looms and glows and signifies but never explains itself. The more the movie leans into enigma, the more it risks losing its center. Balinska keeps finding the center anyway. You can see the thought in her eyes as she weighs whether to believe the man on the line. You can see the anger and the fear and the fatigue settle under her skin. She gives the movie a heartbeat that the script does not always supply.
The direction shows skill in pieces. The photography loves the white vastness and the dark lines of a figure against it. The palette is simple and harsh. Wind claws at the soundtrack. The cut from a memory to the crunch of boots is precise. You can feel the technical team trying to build a world out of snow and silence and static. There are stretches where it works. The landscape becomes a character that does not care who lives or dies. The radio crackle becomes a presence that might be lying. A flare shoots into the blue and fizzles and feels like hope wasting itself in the air.
What troubles the movie is not craft so much as design. You can sense the idea of it outpacing the plan. It feels at times like an ambitious short stretched to feature length without the connective tissue that would make the long version breathe on its own. The first act does not ground Abby at home in a way that would make the later visions hit harder. The middle portion keeps hinting at a pattern behind the weirdness but keeps changing the pattern as soon as we notice it. The final movement reaches for revelation and instead delivers more hints and more fog.
There is another film inside this one about work and risk and how poverty forces you to gamble with your body. The uranium mine is not just a spooky backdrop. It is a dangerous job that only exists because someone has to take the hazard so someone else can have electricity. The movie almost goes there. It almost asks what we ask people like Abby to do for the rest of us. Then it wanders back into the snow and the stone and the voice on the radio. It would have been a stronger piece if it kept those threads in hand and pulled.
Rob Delaney deserves a moment here. Acting through a radio is a gift and a trap. He has to convey warmth and threat without eyes or gestures. He does it with cadence. He rounds his vowels to sound like a friend, then clips a word to sound like someone in charge. He asks questions like a therapist and then snaps into a tone that sounds like an officer. It is slippery in an interesting way. He never overplays it. He keeps us wondering if we should be relieved that Abby has someone to talk to, or if we should be yelling at her to throw the radio in a snowbank and run the other direction.
The Occupant leaves itself open to interpretation. Some viewers will build a theory of death and afterlife and say it all clicks. Others will claim it is a dream logic narrative that you feel rather than decode. I can see both arguments. I also think a movie can be enigmatic and still make its rules felt, and this one often shrugs at that responsibility. The best ambiguous stories make their own kind of sense. You may not be able to write down the math, but you know the solution balances. Here the equation keeps changing variables mid problem.
That said, there are scenes that simply work. Abby crawling under a downed fuselage while the wind screams and the metal groans. Abby arguing with a voice that will not say what it wants. Abby pulling off a boot and looking at a toe she may not keep. Abby pressing a piece of glass to a cut and then catching her breath, the pain changing her plan. These are the moments when cinema is body and breath and obstacle and need. There is no trick. There is only now. Balinska excels at the now.
I kept thinking about grief as I watched it. That stubborn refusal to accept that a person you love is leaving. Abby takes the job because she thinks money can beat time. She heads into the cold because movement feels better than waiting. She clings to a voice with a name because silence is unbearable. She holds a stone like it can fix the rules. The movie understands that impulse. It does not always turn it into drama that lands, but it gets the feeling right. Denial is a powerful motor. It can take you a long way into bad weather.
The title points to a theme the film toys with but never fully embraces. Who or what is the occupant. Is it Abby inside a harsh environment that wants to expel her. Is it grief living inside Abby, taking up space. Is it the voice in the radio that insinuates itself into her choices. Is it the stone that seems to carry a presence. The title invites a reading of intrusion. Something moves into a space that is not exactly its own and alters everything around it. The movie puts little markers next to all of those readings and then leaves us to assemble them.
It is fair to call this a student film in spirit, and I do not mean that as a cheap shot. Student films are daring. They swing at big ideas. They are messy because they try to do more than their resources allow. The Occupant has that energy. It is eager. It is reaching. It needs more drafts. It needs someone to say that the home scenes are not fat to cut but bones to strengthen. It needs the science fiction device to have clearer contours so that the ambiguity feels earned rather than improvised. It needs cleaner handoffs between modes so that the horror of the environment feeds the family drama and vice versa.
I also do not want to ignore what works because there is plenty here. Hugo Keijzer shows he can stage action in adverse conditions. He can create a sense of place with a few simple elements. He gets a performance from his lead that is worth the ticket. He makes a radio conversation as tense as a chase. These are not small things. They are the bricks of a career. If the next script has a stronger spine, he could make something special.
If you go in with the right expectations, you may have a good time. Do not expect a tidy puzzle that clicks into place at the end. Do not expect answers to every question. Expect instead to watch an actor give everything to a role that demands endurance and vulnerability at once. Expect to feel cold. Expect to worry about a sister you only meet in fragments. Expect to get mad at a voice that cannot stop sounding a little smug even when it tries to comfort. Expect to argue with the movie on the way home. That last one is not the worst thing.
I left thinking about the courage it takes to make a work that is both this naked and this unfinished. There is bravery in putting a character through the wringer and trusting the audience to track her soul as much as her steps. There is risk in blending a survival yarn with a meditation on loss and then sprinkling in a touch of the uncanny. The risk does not fully pay off here. The blend is lumpy. Still, the ambition is not fake. You can feel it. The filmmakers want to say something about love and fear and the way the world can turn unfamiliar in a single day. They just have not found the right container.
So where does that leave The Occupant. It is not a disaster. It is not a triumph. It sits in that crowded middle where promising parts pull against each other. It is a showcase for Ella Balinska, who deserves a run of roles that let her build on this. It is a calling card for a director who can shoot ice and fire and a human face and make all three pop. It is a reminder that genre blends are tricky. You cannot just set three tones next to each other and hope they harmonize. You have to tune them.
If the film had trusted its core, it might have been something fierce. A sister racing against weather and time. A worker taking a job that strips away her illusions. A voice in the darkness that tempts and warns. Those elements are all here. They just needed more time in the script to fuse. As it stands, the movie is like footsteps in fresh snow that crisscross and loop and wander before fading out. You can follow them for a while. You may even enjoy the walk. You just might wish they led somewhere more decisive.
I will remember Balinska most of all. The trembling hands. The set jaw. The small smile when she thinks she has found a way, even if the way is only a guess. She pulls the entire piece toward something human and true. When the film starts to drift, she keeps it from floating away. There are shots of her face that say more than any line reading could. You believe her. That belief is enough to carry you through the stretches that feel adrift.
In the end, the film asks you to meet it halfway, maybe more than halfway. If you are willing to walk into the white without a map, you may find shards of beauty in the glare. If you need a clear path, you may spend a lot of time squinting. Either way, The Occupant announces a performer in command and a director with real instincts. Next time, with a script that picks one road and really walks it, they might lead us somewhere unforgettable. For now, we have an icy odyssey that is by turns gripping and baffling, honest in its emotions and confused in its storytelling, and never less than alive whenever Ella Balinska is on screen. That is not nothing. It is a start.
