At First Light

The rare example of an understated, effectively told young-adult yarn that places emphasis on grounded characters, nuanced performances and stunning visuals over convolution and clichés, Canadian filmmaker Jason Stone’s At First Light boasts unpretentious but exciting surface-level charms.

Stone doesn’t explicitly ask the straightforward, big-picture questions you’ll find in a film like “Arrival.” But his attention to detail and character, and his ability to render those people in recognizable settings, is engrossing.

Apart from the uncommon notion that these mysterious visitors may actually mean us well, the film seems a little too comfortable with clichés, right down to the men in black who show up mid-movie to ruin everybody’s fun.

Lacking the flash of big-budget blockbusters or the originality of a uniquely imagined world, First Light is left trying to make the best of overly familiar sci-fi themes.

Try as I might, I just wasn’t all that invested in the fate of Alex and Sean or their own private close encounter with the third kind. Which is a shame as the filmmaker shows a keen flair for creating both an interesting visual and aural palette.