A writer invites his friends to a mansion for a getaway, but all is not what it seems in Steve Pink’s thrilling Terrestrial, presented as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival 2025.
One might expect a more comedic film from Terrestrial based on the director. Steve Pink is most known, directorially, for Hot Tub Time Machine. That was a wonderfully ridiculous move that reveled in its premise and the ’80s comedy riffs. (Let’s just ignore the lackluster sequel.) He’s also written two other fantastic John Cusack-led High Fidelity (from the book by Nick Hornby) and Grosse Pointe Break. His new film Terrestrial is not wholly comedy, but a solid, twisty thriller with a thread of dark comedy running through.
Pink wastes no time setting the audience up to expect violent turns, starting in media res of lead Allen in a distressed position, covered in blood, with a trail of the same heading deeper into a mansion. Before you can say “I bet you wonder how I got here,” we flash to a different time and his friends arriving at his new mansion. He’s ready to show off the results of a book and media deal. But it isn’t long before cracks begin to show, secrets are questioned, and revealed; and blood flows. All with a slight, sly smile of the dark comic underpinnings. The sort of watching a web being built and unraveled.
But wait, there’s more! While a basic premise might be enough to fill a film, Pink and writers Connor Diedrich & Samuel Johnson wisely widen the scope, bringing in more characters, twists, time shifts, and more blood. Pink expertly moves through the wider tale, crafting a story that, while jumping around the time frames (without a hot tub, no time machine here), is kept straight. Each shift, moving somewhere new or presenting a previously seen sequence from a new angle, deepens the mystery and discomfort. Without showing the film’s hand, on the whole, it’s a nice revision of the home invasion flick, with multiple forces working in different directions. To his credit, Pink keeps all the balls in the air without a fumble to the juggle each time the film reinvents itself or produces a new wrinkle.
Across his career, Steve Pink has excelled in molding personal relationships, especially in High Fidelity and Grosse Pointe Break. While he didn’t pen it, Terrestrial is no exception. Friends of Allen, Ryan, Maddie, and Vic have their pasts and their relationships evident and able to be read and explored. The banter is strong, and the dialogue and characters are well defined. At the center is Jermaine Fowler’s Allen. Fowler expertly handles all the baggage, playing multiple levels and truths concurrently, especially as more of what is going on is revealed; he’s playing a man cracking under pressure, obviously lying to his friends, acting strangely, but Fowler never overplays it. The performance only gets better as time shifts open the character and explain the whys of the weirdness.
His interactions with S. J. Percell, a favorite author played acerbically by Brendan Hunt, best known as Ted Lasso’s Coach Beard, are high points. On an aside, part of this sci-fi author’s history is a bad 90s TV adaptation of his property. It gains levity to any tension in the real world thrills (along with commenting on it), looking like the McCoy era Doctor Who and starring Hot Tub Time Machine’s Craig Robinson and Rob Corddry. There’s some good conversation about getting too close to a property and those behind it, how it can blind your desires and actions.
It all comes together in a paranoid delight of a tight little film. Steve Pink’s Terrestrial is a well-written and superbly performed twisty thriller with a dark comedy edge. Jermaine Fowler gives a fantastic performance, and I was all on board with each shift.
Terrestrial is presented as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival.
Fantasia 2025 runs from July 16th to August 3rd 2025