Review: OSIRIS
Pretend It's 2005 and You've Never Seen This Before
Osiris is not an independent film. Let’s get that straight. In this day and age, a $6.7-million budget does not make one an ‘independent film’. That’s more money than last year’s best picture winner, Anora, cost and I didn’t even consider that an independent film. If this film had been released in the early-aughts, it would have cost $30M to produce. In that, Osiris is sort of a throwback picture to the days of high-tech creature features and sci-fi horror. The film feels like a combination of two Neil Marshall films - The Descent and Dog Soldiers, with some non-Marshall Skyline thrown in for added flavor. The creatures themselves look like a mixture of a xenomorph, a predator, and “Audrey II” from Little Shop of Horrors. Osiris doesn’t have an original bone in its body, and feels somewhat out of place in 2025, but there’s enough well-directed action and some amusing performances to allow for a recommendation.
During a violent incursion, a group of Special Forces commandos are abducted by an alien species, and awake to find Earth destroyed and vicious alien creatures around every corner. That’s really the extent of the plot here. We eventually learn that the soldiers are being taken back to the aliens’ home planet as trophies, unless they are used as food beforehand. Much of this exposition comes from the great Linda Hamilton, woefully under-utilized as a Russian woman who has been hiding and scavenging on the ship for 30+ years. We rarely get to see Hamilton grace our screens these days, so to see her treated this way is particularly frustrating. Even if her accent is, at times, questionable, you cannot underestimate the sheer power of her screen presence, which comes equipped with decades of feminist bad-assery.
Despite clearly being shot on nothing but soundstages, Osiris makes the most of its industrial, claustrophobic locale. I’ve never understood why an advanced alien species would design their ship like an old rusty freighter, but here we are. If you get Doom vibes, you’re not wrong. But, director William Kaufman knows his way around an action sequence. A veteran of adrenaline-fueled VOD flicks like The Channel, Warhorse One, and Daylight’s End, Kaufman has become more and more confident in his talents, which might be limited, but are enough for a picture like this. The creatures are used effectively, and we never see enough to realize they’re just suits; the geography of the ship makes sense; and the motivations of the characters are as simple as they were in The Poseidon Adventure - get from point A to point B. With that kind of simplicity, it’s easier for a filmmaker like Kaufman to build set-pieces that drive the story, as well as provide the blood and guts needed for horror audiences.
Doom. The Matrix. Alien. Predator. Alien vs. Predator. The Descent. Dog Soldiers. Skyline. Resident Evil. Pitch Black. Battlefield Earth. Those are just a few of the films owed a debt of gratitude from Osiris. It takes elements from all of them, intentionally or not. It’s difficult to become too invested in a film that feels like it’s cobbled together from so many better ones. The characters aren’t fleshed out enough to really command your attention, though veteran character actors like Max Martini do their best. Linds Edwards has some fun as “Nash”, the redneck of the group, but even he has no backstory other than ‘soldier’. It’s also difficult to root for a group of guys who spend the first ten-minutes of the movie mercilessly slaughtering dozens and dozens of people, even if they are terrorists. To these soldiers, there is no difference between a terrorist threat and an alien threat. I wish that was explored more.
Osiris works as a simple piece of sci-fi horror entertainment, and nothing more. There was a time when a film like this would have enjoyed an ample box office release, and probably finished in the top five, at least. As it stands, it’s better than you’d expect for a film released on VOD and in limited release at the same time. I expect audience members who went into this picture on a whim probably found themselves pleasantly surprised. Hell, I was pleasantly surprised. What Osiris does right is enough for a moderate recommendation, but the lack of character development, the misuse of Linda Hamilton, and the derivative plot beats hold it back from being a genuine entertainment. That said, with a $6.7- million budget that clearly went primarily to creature design, maybe its heart and money were in the right place?
RATING: **1/2/***** (now playing on VOD and in limited release)