Chile went through political turmoil in the 1970s when Augusto Pinochet became their president. With the Pinochet regime already in power and ending civilian rule in 1984, UFOs were hovering above the sky. One day, radio jockeys Cristina Carvelli, Daniel Morales, Cristina Muñoz, and her spouse Octavio Ortiz receive a message from a sailor named Hector. He informs them from his dispatch at the Mitahues Lighthouse that “a big fireball” has landed at the mysterious, human-inhabited Friendship (an island in Los Chonos Archipelago) and is approaching them.

This synopsis from Cristóbal Valenzuela Berríos’ film Alien Island already feels like an episode from The Twilight Zone or an anthology entry written by Phillip K. Dick, but these events happened. To elicit the genre’s tropes and revere the so-called conspiracists, Berríos and cinematographer Mattías Illanes shot it in black-and-white, suggesting classics à la The Manchurian Candidate (1962) or The Battle of Chile (1973). These...