Trauma From the Past, Trauma From the Skies in Descendent

There are moments in life that rock your sense of certainty about how the world works. Pivotal changes like the birth of your first child or the first time you get abducted by aliens.

The terrifying coincidence of both happening at the same time powers sci fi domestic drama Descendent, which flies into Austin for its world premiere this Monday at South By Southwest. Writer/director Peter Cilella started the script in March 2020 when, “if you remember, we were hit with a pretty nasty pandemic. I just had a movie stall out, I wasn’t working, [I] felt adrift, and like I didn’t have any control over my life.” At the same time, he had recently become a father, with two small kids facing a very uncertain world. He said, “Men want to be fixers, but there are things you can’t fix.”

That raw parental fear emerged in the script, as father-to-be Sean (Ross Marquand) becomes increasingly desperate in his attempts to adapt to this new phase in his life, especially as he’s still contending with the legacy of his own father. Cilella described his struggles as “an exploration of control, and how we lose control in our lives, and the misguided ways we try to regain that control.”

Oh, yeah, and then there’s the fact that Sean may be being abducted by aliens. As a child, like so many people, Cilella was obsessed with Whitley Strieber’s Communion, in which the bestselling author of The Wolfen and The Hunger claimed he had been abducted by strange figures he simply called the visitors. The book was a smash hit, the iconic figure of a grey being with large, black, pupilless eyes staring off bookshelves across the world. “I remember being in the grocery store and seeing that paperback at the checkout and being fascinated by it.”

Communion redefined and standardized how people saw aliens. Prior to that, reports of aliens varied from giants to goblins, but by the time of the UFO media boom of the 1990s – spearheaded in 1993 by The X-Files and Fire in the Sky (based on similar abduction claims by logger Travis Walton) – alien abduction became synonymous with those big-eyed greys and their clinical, surgical probing. However, coming from a microbudget background that wouldn’t stretch to elaborate sets or effects, Cilella went back to the essence of the script and took a more psychological approach. He said, “The question was, well, what goes on in somebody’s head when they’ve been abducted? I wanted to keep it grounded.”

He was directly inspired by Jeff Nichols’ Take Shelter and its low-key approach to the apocalypse. “I remember seeing it and going, ‘Oh my god, I want to do my version of that,’ and seeing how he could tackle a big idea like the end times and really distill it into a powerful character drama, I knew that was always going to be my approach.”

Even as Sean undergoes physical and emotional trials – both of his own making and at the hands of unseen entities - Cilella doesn’t describe Descendent as bleak. Instead, he sees its depiction of a man seemingly crippled by external forces as liberating. “If there’s a takeaway from this film, what I want audiences to get is that when the world seems to be swimming out of your control and life seems to be falling apart, basically the best way forward is to show up for the ones you love.”

---

Descendent

Midnighter, World Premiere

Monday 10, 9pm, Alamo South Lamar
Tuesday 11, 11am, Violet Crown
Wednesday 12, 10pm, Alamo South Lamar

---

Catch up with all of The Austin Chronicle's SXSW 2025 coverage.