Rating: NR | Runtime: 104 minutes
Release Date: August 8th, 2025 (USA)
Studio: Decal Releasing
Director(s): Hugo Keijzer
Writer(s): Philip Michael Howe, Hugo Keijzer, Roelof Jan Minneboo & Xiao Tang / Philip Michael Howe (story)

Where would your mind take you?

Beth (Vanessa Ifediora) is more than just a sister to Abby (Ella Balinska). She’s her best friend. So, when the prospect of losing her to illness arises—in much the same way as they lost their mother—Abby cannot cope. She wants the best doctors. The most cutting-edge treatments. The fantasy that if you simply try hard enough and hope long enough, everything will be okay. It’s why she ignores Beth’s wishes to spend what little time she has left together and decides to go off to the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia to hunt for uranium deposits and raise enough capital to afford one more “miracle” that’s probably just another dead end.

Director Hugo Keijzer (and his co-writers Philip Michael Howe, Roelof Jan Minneboo, and Xiao Tang) do a very good job presenting Abby as a hero at the start of The Occupant. Here she is sacrificing everything she has to save her sister no matter how crazy the task or how far she’s traveled. It sets up their father (Stuart Graham’s Archie) as a pessimist in the sense that he’d rather ensure his eldest daughter is comfortable in death than suffering in hope. So, when Abby still can’t find what she’s looking for and Archie still can’t stand seeing Beth’s pain, the former plans a return to stop him from giving up too early.

It’s through the gradual reveal of memories that we rightfully realize this sense of heroism is built by Abby as a coping mechanism to avoid facing reality. Because there’s a point when hope becomes destructive by sowing seeds of regret without you fully comprehending that you’re already too late to stop it. We see it when Archie asks her to reconsider her journey and when Beth tells her she can justify her actions any way she wants so long as she doesn’t lie by saying she’s doing it for Beth rather than herself. I love a line where Abby yells that she’s “doing everything she can to get back” since she never should have left in the first place.

That “everything” is where the film’s survival aspect enters the fray. Right when it seems Abby found something to leverage into a windfall (albeit not uranium), Archie calls to say time is up. So, she stows this obsidian-like chunk of rock into her backpack, boards a helicopter, and plans her next excuse for why Beth should hang on. Unfortunately, a swarm of birds flying much higher than they should comes into their path and cuts through the engine. Suddenly Abby finds herself alone in sub-zero temps with days of hiking separating her from rescue. That’s when a voice is heard over a shortwave walkie-talkie and she discovers her rock isn’t quite as inert as she believed.

The point at which John (Rob Delaney) is introduced occurs just after we begin to worry about Abby’s sanity. Not only is it unlikely that someone finally hears her transmission for help, but it’s a wild coincidence he happens to speak English and even wilder still that he also survived a crash. Does that mean he’s a manifestation of Abby’s gradual psychosis? Maybe. What if it means this place is ruled by a supernatural force that simply takes down anyone who dares to cross into it? We’re talking Russian occupied territory, after all. Geography that’s so hush-hush and dangerous that Abby’s pilot wouldn’t even veer over to see his ancestral home.

It’s in that space of uncertainty that we start learning why Abby has really come here. By talking to John over the radio, the cracks in her steely façade begin to show. Yes, she hopes to earn the money that can pay for a last-ditch treatment to save Beth’s life, but she also just plain ran away to do so. This whole adventure is therefore driven by fear. She was too afraid to confront the prospect of losing Beth then to fulfill her wishes to live instead of merely survive. And now she’s too afraid to risk missing the chance to say goodbye that she’ll risk her own life to take the more arduous route to John than the smoother one to civilization.

We know it’s a mistake regardless of whether John is on the up-and-up and that feeling only increases once the rock seemingly comes to life to assist choices that pull her further into the wilderness. It’s as though it has sentience on top of a newfound malleability perfectly attuned to Abby’s current needs. So, we must ask ourselves the obvious questions: Where is it really leading her? Has it already claimed John? Did Abby even survive the crash? And while we ask ourselves those queries, she finally looks within to consider the reasons she’s about to die before Beth. What was her true endgame beyond a delusional fantasy that never would have justified the sacrifice necessary to see it through?

The Occupant inevitably goes to some strange and sufficiently dark places to satisfactorily explain the rock in Abby’s possession, but it never strays from the underlying truth of her accepting her sister’s fate. The whole becomes a showcase for Balinska as it’s practically a one-woman show even when other characters are on-screen considering Abby’s sole mission is to selfishly create the future Abby wants. Everyone else is a steppingstone to that destination—including Beth. It’s why the choice Abby must make at the end is such a difficult one. She can either achieve a fabricated version of that perfect future or appreciate what’s left of her tragic yet very real present.

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Ella Balinska in THE OCCUPANT; courtesy of Decal Releasing.