WATCH THE SKIES - Mark Reviews Movies

Watch the Skies, XYZ Films / Flawless

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 8, 2025

The sense of mystery is strong in Watch the Skies, which follows a ragtag team of UFO seekers who might have stumbled upon some potentially convincing evidence that aliens do exist. The movie, co-written and directed by the filmmaker who dubs himself Crazy Pictures (He's also an editor and the visual effects supervisor on the project—almost like a one-man production team in a way), slowly provides an enticing sense of revelation, too, as the crew's investigation leads them toward the distinct possibility that some otherworldly truth is out there.

This is mostly entertaining for its grounded sense of wonder, however, because there are some neat sights and plenty of shots of amazed faces staring up at those sights. The screenplay, co-written by Jimmy Nivrén Olsson, has clearly been inspired by the down-to-earth science-fiction movies and TV shows of the 1970s, '80s, and '90s, from its mid-1990s setting to the fact that every character in it looks and speaks as if they've watched every episode of "The X-Files" at least twice. This team is a likeable bunch of misfits and outcasts, so it's disappointing that the script has chosen the character with the most questionable degree of sympathy as its protagonist.

She's Denise (Inez Dahl Torhaug), an older teen living with a foster family after the disappearance of her father several years ago. Dad (played by Oscar Töringe) was a UFO hunter, too, who founded the organization UFO Sweden to research possible sightings, and after believing the key to locating a crashed alien vessel lies in weather reports, he went off on his own to the mountains to investigate the spot, never to be seen again.

All those years later, Denise picks up where her father's work ended on her own, often by extralegal or flat-out criminal methods. She'd probably be in juvenile detention at this point, except that a kind local cop named Tomi (Sara Shirpey) has some sympathy for the girl's situation. The movie offers plenty of reasons to think that our protagonist takes her obsession a bit too far and at the cost of putting others into peril, but the way she finally repays the cop for probably years of keeping her out of legal trouble is almost certainly the point where any reason to care about this character goes out the window.

It's a strange choice, because UFO Sweden is filled with plenty of nice, rational, and hopeful characters in whom to find amusement. Most of them are little more than bit players, as Denise's desperate search for any sign of her father escalates, but even characters such as Töna (Isabelle Kyed), who always seems happy with even the littlest bit of proof, and Gunnar (Håkan Ehn), who has been at this kind of work longer than probably anyone else in the group and can see right through Denise's scheming, are more agreeable than our selfish hero.

UFO Sweden is currently led by Lennart (Jesper Barkselius), a former scientist for a meteorological operation, whom Denise's father betrayed by stealing documents from him. Since the father's disappearance, Lennart has taken the group in a more pragmatic direction, learning from the missing founder's mistakes and blind determination to follow each and every lead. The new guy wants evidence, and after Denise is certain that her father's car somehow crash-landed in a farmer's barn, she believes that's all the evidence the group needs to pick up the father's trail and follow it to both him and aliens.

The whole point of Denise's character, of course, is that she's desperate to find her father and, because she's just like him, that she is willing to go to extremes to follow through on her hunches. We understand the character, to be sure, but within the context of the movie's wide-eyed innocence and aura of amazement about the search for extraterrestrial truth, the character's harsh attitude, self-involved behavior, and tendency to put others in jeopardy simply doesn't fit the tone of the rest of the movie.

It pulls us in with those revelatory moments—such as when the puzzling car starts playing a favorite song of Denise's father, when a phenomenon like the northern lights signals that there might be some unidentified flying craft in the sky, or, in a particularly clever sequence, an industrial magnet finds something in a lake at the exact spot where Denise is convinced a UFO has crashed. The special effects here are quite effective, especially since so many of them, such as the car crash and what happens when the object that magnet has attached itself to is too heavy for the winch pulling in the mysterious thing, seem practically accomplished (The most blatant—and questionable—visual effect, by the way, is an AI-assisted process that adapts the Swedish-speaking actors' mouths to look as if they're moving to voice the English dubbing).

Then, Denise does or says something that pulls us right back out of that feeling of wonder, and Watch the Skies suffers a bit too much from that unnecessary back-and-forth of attitude. Otherwise, it's a neat little movie that mainly looks and feels neat because the stakes, the storytelling, and the budget to pull of these effects are so clearly little. It's an homage to an older, simpler kind of movie and way of making them, and if not for the most obvious flaw, it might have succeeded fully in that mode.

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