DESCENDENT - Mark Reviews Movies

Descendent, RLJE Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 7, 2025

A lot is going on in the life of Sean (Ross Marquand), the central character of Descendent, but it's also a life that, ironically, is stuck in place on multiple levels. Writer/director Peter Cilella's feature debut uses what seems to be a story about alien abduction to get to the core of his protagonist's assorted fears, insecurities, and reasons for being so uncertain about himself, what his life is, and what it might never be.

The impetus for this exploration is, of course, what Sean believes to be a very close encounter with extraterrestrial life. What's surprising, perhaps, is how little those aliens actually matter to Cilella's screenplay. They apparently arrive, linger in the background as one possibility for why Sean begins to behave differently and have visions of both his past and a potentially ruinous future for him, and, without saying too much, do figure into at least part of the story's resolution. By the time the film gets to that point, though, we realize that the entire story could have functioned entirely without even the suggestion of aliens.

That's a strength here, because Cilella's aims are more psychological than supernatural. In fact, one could say that the plot actually starts well before Sean's potential encounter with an extraterrestrial ship and its alien inhabitants. Everything that happens in this story, really, only occurs because Sean is about to become a first-time father. He's terrified of that prospect for several reasons.

For one thing, he never exactly had parents of his own, so how is he supposed to know what his own role as a parent should be? His wife Andrea (Sarah Bolger) knows her husband's tragic back story, in which his mother died during childbirth and his father could only, as Sean puts it, "hang on" for a few years after that. He was basically raised in a house with his best friend Christian (Dan O'Brien) and the friend's mother Robin (Susan Wilder), who wants to be seen as a mother figure in Sean's mind to this day but has a strangely judgmental way of showing her maternal side.

Essentially, Sean doesn't think he's good enough to be a parent, and even before the character's late-night encounter with a light dashing unnaturally across the sky, Cilella establishes all of the worries and concerns that are about to become amplified by the question of the aliens. Sean has a job as a security guard at a local school but hopes that his boss (played by Parvesh Cheena) still stick by a promise to put in a good word with one of his relatives, a tech mogul in need of private security. Sean does everything that and more than the boss asks of him, even texting with his boss during Andrea's ultrasound, to prove himself in order to have the chance of a good career that will provide for his family.

None of that, of course, works out, because Sean ends up on the school roof during a storm, witnesses that darting light, and, after finding or imagining himself inside an alien ship with his dead father (played by the filmmaker) next to him, gets to watch as things progressively become worse. Cilella is obviously playing a sort of game with this setup, since Sean and, by extension, we are never certain if the man's visions are real or all in his head—the result of what a doctor presumes is a concussion from Sean falling off the roof. The full extent of the crafty nature of this story doesn't reveal itself until the very end, in what could be seen as a pretty anticlimactic, antithetical, and clichéd sort of answer.

It doesn't feel that way, though, because of the way that the final explanation isn't the point of the story. Everything that happens before that means something, even things that may or may not or are definitely could not be "real."

That's because Cilella uses the gimmick and the gamesmanship as springboards to get inside Sean's mind. His worries, for example, are not only that he won't be a good father but also that, with Andrea experiencing abdominal pains recently, that he won't become a father at all. Marquand's quiet, subdued performance tunes into those multilayered feelings of helplessness, as Sean worries he's not enough in the moment, won't be enough in the future, and has never been enough, especially because of the circumstances of his own father's death. At times, Sean almost seems to be following a similar path—a prospect that isn't missed by his therapist (played by Clare Cooney), Robin, or, in a scene that wisely gives the wife a voice amidst Sean's self-involvement, Andrea.

One could blame the abduction or the injury for all of this, since Sean has gained a talent for drawing that he never possessed before the incident, but it's not as simple as that. How many of the character's fears have become and continue to act as a kind of self-sabotage, and how much of his insecurity has made the course of his life a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy? Cilella uses the premise of a science-fiction tale and the pieces of the language of a horror story to delve into Sean's psyche, instead of simply attempting to fool, confuse, or frighten us.

The result is a film that gets at something deeper than its genre trappings. There's a richness of character, as well as a more intimate sense of dread, to Descendent than one might anticipate, given how much the plot owes to the possibility of aliens. Extraterrestrials are just a gimmick here, and that's to the film's benefit.

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