Movie Review: 'Cosmic Dawn' Can't Walk the Line Between Cheap Melodrama and Camp

Cosmic Dawn stars Camille Rowe as Aurora. As a child Aurora witnessed her mother being abducted by aliens. She was 5 years old when it happened but her memories are still vivid. Regardless of her account however, people chalk up the alien story to having been traumatized by her mother’s disappearance. Aurora grows up a lost soul always searching for something she can’t quite wrap her mind around.

Then one night after a rave party, Aurora finds herself drawn by the presence of an older woman to enter a bookstore. Once inside however, Aurora finds that the woman has vanished. The store clerk, Natalie (Emmanuelle Chiriqui), finds Aurora searching for the woman she saw in the supernatural section. While Aurora takes interest in a book about alien abduction, Natalie steers her toward a different book called Cosmic Dawn. A photo of the author reveals that she is the older woman that Aurora followed into the store.

Natalie knows the author, Elyse (Antonia Zegers), and invites Aurora to come meet her at a private get together. Thinking that Elyse may be the key to finding out what really happened to her mother, Aurora agrees. The meeting turns out to be an invitation to join a cult called Cosmic Dawn. The cult leader, Elyse, believes that aliens will be returning to Earth soon to invite believers to go into space and live forever.

Cosmic Dawn was written and directed by Jefferson Moneo on a limited budget. The film at times has the look of a television movie crossed with a 60’s drive in feature. The style of the storytelling is deeply disjointed with the story bouncing back and forth in time from Aurora joining the cult to her having escaped and now planning to return so that she can confront Elyse for reasons that will eventually become clear.

If you aren’t paying attention closely it can be easy to get lost. The main characters in Cosmic Dawn aren’t all that interesting and staying engaged in their stories is a chore. Camille Rowe is mostly a blank space on which we can project our own confusion and genuine desire to try and make sense of what is happening. That’s not a bad approach but when a story is as convoluted as that of Cosmic Dawn it adds to the effort needed to stay involved.

Writer-Director Jefferson Moneo also uses wipe transitions in editing that are utterly jarring in their unintentional hilarity. Each time a scene ended with a wipe transition I smiled and chuckled a little but I am not sure that was the intended effect. I’m so used to traditional seamless editing that when a non-traditional editing style is used I can’t help but react. The wipe transition is an amateurish form of editing that belongs in a decidedly less self-serious movie than Cosmic Dawn.

Don't get overly excited Star Wars fans. I know that George Lucas loved the wipe transition. The difference is that Star Wars is a better movie which employs the wipe transition as part of the overall aesthetic. It's used as a call back to the camp sci-fi that Lucas loved as a young film enthusiast. The wipe transition is fitting of the heightened atmosphere and fun of Star Wars. The makers of Cosmic Dawn don't seem to know which movie they are making and the choice to use the wipe transition feels arbitrary when it is only used sparingly throughout the movie.

The wipe editing only occurs in a few scenes but it makes an impression. Whether it makes the impression that the filmmaker intended is the question and I am not sure I have the answer. I mentioned earlier that the movie has the look of a 60s drive-in movie with the budget of a made for TV movie and part of me is convinced that this is intentional. Where the movie loses me is in the deeply self-serious performances of lead actress Camille Rowe and her main foils, a supporting player played by Joshua Burge and Aurora’s aunt played by Vickie Papavs.

Those performances are played against the more campy and self-aware performances of Zegers and Chiriqui who have the meatier roles as leader and true believer respectively. Zegers is all wide-eyed and unintentionally ominous while Chiriqui slow burns her way toward complete insanity, speaking in tongues and no longer combing her hair. These two performances are legitimately fun with Zegers easily making her campy villain just menacing enough.

Too bad that the rest of the movie is at odds with Zegers and Chiriqui. The lack of control over the tone of Cosmic Dawn dooms the movie to mediocrity at best. Cosmic Dawn is at best competent with moments of fun and a load of unmet potential. Cosmic Dawn will be released in theaters and on streaming rental services on February 11th, 2022.