Running away from home is often associated with the idea that we’re searching for something else. Whether it’s permanently uprooting your life or temporarily stepping away from it all, folks who set their problems aside and venture somewhere far away usually have a reason for doing so. ACIDMAN, director Alex Lehmann’s followup to the underappreciated Netflix gem Paddleton, follows a father and daughter who both are in search of something meaningful in their lives.

Maggie, played by Dianna Agron, tracks down her estranged father Loyd (Thomas Haden Church) to a small town nestled away in the Pacific Northwest. He lives in a run-down house with the word “Acidman” spray-painted on the side (that’s the nickname that the locals have given him). Accompanied only by his dog, her father lives a life of solitude. A former engineer, he likes to spend time making electronic music, smoking weed, and visiting a nearby diner.

When he’s not doing any of those things, he’s attempting to make contact with extraterrestrials.

One night, Maggie catches him as he’s just about to go on a drive. She offers to join him, and he takes her to a breathtaking spot up in the mountains. With an infrared camera and pair of binoculars, he shows her several red lights hovering in the sky way off in the distance. He believes they are UFOs, simply stopping by for a few moments before vanishing back into the night sky. An “interplanetary driveby,” he calls it.

On the way home, he tells her that “they” contacted him years ago – that they chose him because they knew he was listening. Back at the house, Maggie combs through her dad’s many videotapes, where he has documented each of these encounters with the lights in the sky. His alien obsession only adds to the existing friction between him and his daughter. Not only does she struggle to understand how a scientific man like himself could be caught up in what she considers to be nothing more than conspiracy theories, but she also grieves the years during which he was absent from her life. Her father, on the other hand, feels as though he was abandoned by his friends and colleagues, saying that he was shunned for his enthusiasm on the subject of UFOs.

Both Maggie and her father are guilty of running away from home in search of a connection of sorts. Maggie has put her life on pause to make this journey in an effort to reunite with her father – it’s only near the end of the film that we really get a sense as to what truly motivated her to visit him. It’s also worth noting that this is not the first time she has run away from home either, as she reminisces about an attempt made during her childhood where she made it all the way to the treehouse in her backyard.

Her father, meanwhile, seems to have forgotten the essentials of human communication in his quest to understand these advanced life forms appearing in the sky. During one of their conversations, her father explains that he takes comfort in knowing that these aliens, despite being able to travel across galaxies, still decide to visit Earth regularly to check on us to make sure we’re okay.

After her recent role in 2020’s Shiva Baby, it’s exciting to see Agron appear in more small festival-circuit dramedies such as these. Thomas Haden Church does a wonderful job, with his shaggy appearance and gruff voice really selling this character who straddles the line between being intelligent and downright kooky. Visually, things are impressive here too. The blue and green color palette of the Pacific Northwest setting is really gorgeous, and the handheld camerawork keeps things engaging.

As compelling as the themes are here, it can feel heavy-handed at times with a script that unfortunately never reaches the emotional heights that I wanted it to. For instance, the film makes an effort to touch on the idea that parents fear that their children will grow up to make the same mistakes that they made and this feels somewhat undercooked here. Whereas Paddleton hit me like a bag of bricks, particularly with its third act, ACIDMAN seems content on simply being a pleasant enough ride during its brisk runtime.

This is to say that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – in fact, there’s almost certainly an audience here that will relate to what ACIDMAN is trying to communicate. Maybe it’s perhaps not more than the sum of its parts. But this is a weird, charming father-daughter story about the parallels between meaningful human connection and making first contact with visitors from outer space.

ACIDMAN had its world premiere at Tribeca on June 10th.

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Tom Milligan

Owner at Critical Milligan

Tom Milligan graduated from Pace University with a degree in Film and Screen Studies. He has written for a handful of entertainment websites, including ComicsVerse, and runs his own blog titled “Critical Milligan.” He loves foreign language films, video games, and Carly Rae Jepsen.

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