Out There review – saucer-eyed teen searches for aliens in YA comedy drama

Wales, 1999: Maz is convinced her dead father was abducted by extraterrestrials in Simon Ryninks’s likable film, with a funny turn from Michael Sheen as a new age type

Feature first-timer Simon Ryninks writes and directs this likably daft but big-hearted YA comedy drama, inspired by West Wales’s reputation as a hotspot for UFO sightings – particularly Broad Haven in Pembrokeshire, where many saucer-eyed people in 1977 really did report close encounters of the first kind. Now the scene is the fictionalised Welsh town of Caradoc in 1999, a world of smoking in pubs, dot-matrix computer printouts, Sony Handicam video cameras and droll references to the New Labour government.

Maz (Nerys Amber Stocks) is a teenager doing A-levels, haunted by the death of her dad five years before: a scientist working at a top secret Ministry of Defence base who was killed in a mysterious incident involving a flash of white light from above. She witnessed this terrible event as a kid, having cheekily smuggled herself into the base in the back of his car, but now can’t quite remember it in detail. PTSD? Or have aliens wiped her memory?

She is obsessed with the idea that her dad isn’t dead but rather was abducted by aliens, and that she might yet be able to see him again. So she conceives a plan to get back into that heavily guarded base, a scheme that is to involve her loyal but nervous best mate Elis (Tom Maya) and gibbering local ufologist Bryn (Aneurin Barnard).

And for extra help with understanding the vast reaches of the cosmos and opening the doors of perception, they ask new age shop owner and drug enthusiast Shifty Gruff (an amusing turn from Michael Sheen), Caradoc’s own Howard Marks, who supplies shrooms to the local youth and offers to give hypnotherapy to Maz to unlock memories and visions. “Have you done regression therapy before?” asks Elis suspiciously. “I have in a past life …” says Gruff smoothly. When his hypnosis is unexpectedly successful, Gruff becomes very excited. Elis warns him: “With great ability comes great …” and Gruff interrupts: “Commercial opportunity!”

Amid the extraterrestrial shenanigans, there’s room for some melancholy thoughts that UFO belief is just an inability to accept death, to accept that this, here on Earth, is all that there is. This is entertaining stuff from Ryninks, though I was sad that there wasn’t a bigger role for the excellent Kimberley Nixon. It could spin off nicely as a TV series.

• Out There screened at the Edinburgh film festival