Reviews of this film are mostly favorable. Those viewers must have understood the film much better than I did.
The plot (sort of): Ten years ago, an alien came to Earth, and set up shop in the isolated town of Sunderland (get it? Sunderland; like it's sundered from the world), somewhere in the southwestern desert (hence the original title of the film, "The Sunderland Experiment"). The people of the town call it the Angel. The town is now fenced in with a keyed electric gate. All normal life has ended there. The Angel has taken over the minds and bodies of the adults, and now that the children are growing up, they face a choice: They can attend "school" to learn the teachings of the Angel, and "be blessed" or "evolve" like their parents, or they can "fall," meaning live their lives in the wasteland at the edge of town, where their small rebellions are tolerated as long as they remain within the confines of Sunderland. To be "blessed," the Angel feeds them something from its own body that joins the human's mind, and even the human's body, to its own, promising a life of transcendental bliss. Of course, don't you believe it: The adults are now zombielike drones, mentally linked to the Angel, who are raising their kids to suffer the same fate. When a person dies in Sunderland, they're "planted" - literally. They are reborn as plants, with the person's head at the top of the stalk.
The town is beyond squalid. That keyed gate is the only working electrical device in the area. It looks like the town has been without electricity, running water, or telephone service for the whole 10 years since the Angel arrived. Nobody ever changes their clothes. Ever. In fact, it's forbidden to take them off. But the clothes don't look nearly filthy enough. People sleep on worn-out mattresses on the floor. Someone from the town is allowed to go out and buy supplies for the townspeople. How do they cook? Do they now have outhouses in place of bathrooms? (You don't see any.) They have practically no possessions, but they DO have ammunition for their guns. Also, has no one on the outside, like the post office or the authorities, noticed that the town of Sunderland has fallen not just off the grid, but off the map? After 10 years, don't you think they'd be curious?
The special effects and the little bit of CGI are well done. But except for a handful of scenes, I found the film to be essentially incoherent. Some of this, I think, was the clumsy editing; but a good film starts with a good script, and this film either didn't have one, or it got fatally diluted on the way to the screen. I had trouble keeping track of who was who, of who'd been killed and then reanimated and who hadn't, of what was real and what a character hallucinated, and which characters had had little spidery things implanted by the Angel and which didn't. The behavior of some of the characters was completely illogical, even for an illogical imaginary world. The acting is quite amateurish, which isn't surprising in a low-low-budget film like this one, and you have to accept that.
This is an ambitious film with a great premise and a few good moments, but on the whole, "Exile" falls far short of its ambitions.
