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The moment Zonad](Zonad (2013) - Movie | Moviefone) clicked for me was about halfway through, when Cinematical editor Erik Davis leaned over and whispered, “This is like a live-action Simpsons episode.” Yes! Exactly! I mean, you shouldn’t talk during the movie, but yes! The cheerfully implausible story line, the dimwitted but recognizable townsfolk, the cartoonish disregard for reality – if everyone were painted yellow and missing a finger on each hand, you’d swear Fox had commissioned an Irish translation of a season 10 episode.
Zonad is actually the work of brothers John and Kieran Carney. John wrote and directed the sweet indie hit Once](Once (2007) - Movie | Moviefone) a few years ago, but Zonad, based on an unreleased short film the Carneys made in 2003, couldn’t be more different from that. The Tribeca Film Festival program calls it a “zany romp,” which makes it sound awful – I think the same description appears each week in TV Guide next to According to Jim – but no, it really is a zany romp, in the best possible way.
A quaint Irish town called Ballymoran is the setting, where one night the Cassidy family comes home to find a visitor from space unconscious in their living room. They know he’s a visitor from space because he’s wearing a red vinyl suit and a helmet, and because everyone just came from a stargazing event that got them thinking about the possibility of life on other planets. The people of Springfie-- er, Ballymoran are highly suggestible.