The Infinite Husk Review: Big Existential Ideas, Little Faith in Humanity

If The Infinite Husk can be summed up in no more than two words, its “existential dread.” The age-old tale of humanity's purpose, replete with its beauties and flaws, is reawakened by director Aaron Silverstine in his feature debut. This time, it’s in a 100-minute sci-fi thriller, with the existential question emanating top-down and linearly — from a sentient alien species inhabiting human hosts (“husks” as they are called).

The Infinite Husk is a flawed hybrid of 2013’s The Host and Interstellar, infused with the kind of metaphorical ambition one might expect from a Jane Schoenbrun story, but poorly executed. Psychological thrillers play with unstable minds and realities while juxtaposing them with what makes a person, or a people, human. This film does neither. Adamant on presenting the worst of humanity for no meaningful reason, it asks viewers to accept that its alien homecoming journey carries a larger-than-life message about life itself. In its closing stretch, the film's sweeping promise of meaning fades into a conclusion too thin to truly believe in.

Alien Consciousness Finds Humanity a Prison in The Infinite Husk

“Mission one: Acquire Husk. Complete.” These are among the first words in The Infinite Husk that signal its alien-genre origin. The extraterrestrial species seems to exist purely as consciousness, floating among many galaxies. So it’s a good guess what happens when one is forced into the confines of the body of a “primitive” race like humanity in the name of espionage. Vel (Peace Ikediuba) becomes the unwilling prison for such a presence after it overtakes her body in Los Angeles. Exiled from its home planet to Earth, the alien’s only hope of returning home lies in completing its mission: secretly observing the work of a fellow Earth-bound alien scientist, Mauro Circus-Szalewski.

Before the espionage mission can even be begun, it must first learn the idiosyncrasies and workings of its husk. Awkward social behaviors aside (wearing a weird broad smile and not knowing how to drink water), she behaves like any normal “twenty-five to thirty-something-year-old would. Bar asthma, her husk is healthy, unlike the cancer-ridden Mauro, who has been sentenced to life on Earth and has occupied so many husks that he can no longer count them.

Acting normal is the least of her worries as an earthling. Grounded in humanity, she must also navigate its social and psychological complexities, as well as the pervasive hostility expressed through racism, misogyny, and other forms of hate. “I’m certain I did everything right... I even smiled. And yet, he still accosted me. Is it because of this husk? Because of how I look?" says a confused Vel as she grapples with why certain people look at and treat her a certain way.

The Infinite Husk’s Ambition is Annoyingly Vague and Plotholed

The Infinite Husk tries to be very practical in its storytelling by tying up any loose ends of the husks (after all, a “missing” person wouldn’t simply be roaming the streets unnoticed) and by emphasizing the unease of inhabiting another body. However, the film fails to apply this same rigor to its central conceit: the notion that imagination is merely another container for reality. Deprived of the clarity it grants its smaller details, the idea drifts, leaving the narrative unfocused and wayward. Viewers are forced to make sense of the role of language in this equation. Mauro’s study involves transcribing his alien language, which may potentially grant humans the power to shape their own reality, on the premise that human thought is intrinsically bound to language: “the description of the thing becomes the thing,” as he puts it.

None of this is ever meaningfully resolved, nor is any explanation offered for the beef between the higher-ups of a supposedly superior alien species and concepts as basic as language and imagination. Our two main characters basically spend 100 minutes simply trading in mutual disdain for human life and those around them. When they are not doing so, they theorize about a supposed formula behind this language–reality connection, one whose practical application is never explained. Any assumption that this knowledge is intended to benefit humanity is betrayed by the aliens’ persistent longing to return home; it's a means of escape, rather than enlightenment.

Another problem with The Infinite Husk is its pretense of celebrating a species' flawed beauty while remaining unapologetically pessimistic. Although the film repeatedly foregrounds humanity’s capacity for hate and violence, it also acknowledges through Vel’s first-person narration that hostility, including betrayal, is not inherent to the human race. For some reason, the film deems it unnecessary to redeem the pessimism that permeates every layer of its construction, barely disguising it. What else could justify an environment steeped in darkness, where nearly everyone Vel meets appears constructed to represent humanity at its most cruel? A single, genuine act of kindness might have been enough to complicate this worldview and suggest what humanity is capable of beyond cruelty.

Even a repeating piano ostinato that bears criminal similarity to Hans Zimmer’s "Cornfield Chase" in Interstellar fails to evoke the transcendently hopeful feeling the 2014 film once did.Nolan understood the effect of time and what it steals from life; Silverstine clearly doesn't, as he treats humanity at arm's length in The Infinite Husk.