Movie Review: XENO

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: September 19th, 2025 / 01:55 AM

XENO movie poster | ©2025 Blue Fox Entertainment

Rating: PG-13
Stars: Lulu Wilson, Omari Hardwick, Wrenn Schmidt, Trae Romano, Josh Cooke, Paul Schneider, Garrett van der Leun
Writer: Matthew Loren Oates
Director: Matthew Loren Oates
Distributor: Blue Fox Entertainment
Release Date: September 19, 2025

The alien is bigger and scarier, and the situations become darker, but XENO in essence is a variation on E.T.

Fifteen-year-old Renee Rowan (Lulu Wilson) lives in an isolated house with her widowed mom Linda (Wrenn Schmidt) outside a medium-sized town in the New Mexico desert. Linda’s alcoholic boyfriend Chase (Paul Schneider) technically has his own place, but always seems to be there, picking arguments with Renee.

Mainly to get away from tension within the home, Renee rides her small ATV out into the sands – where she encounters a crash-landed xenomorph. The creature is large, dark and has enormous teeth, resembling the iconic extraterrestrials from ALIEN if they had eyes and only one set of jaws. The being is played by Garrett van der Leun, in a costume designed and puppeted by the Jim Henson Creature Shop.

Renee is frightened at first, but when she sees the alien has their foot caught in a trap, she feels compelled to free the creature. Soon enough, a bond is established.

Seeing reconnaissance helicopters in the sky above, Renee coaxes the xenomorph, whom she dubs “Croak” after the froglike sounds they make, into the basement beneath the house.

Some of what follows is about what we’d expect from this set-up. However, unlike E.T., Croak is violently protective of new friend Renee. At the same time, Renee is full of anger at her mother for still being just about incapacitated by grief years after the death of Renee’s dad. Linda’s numbness and denial are what allow the objectionable Chase to remain a fixture in her and Renee’s lives, even when his behavior begins to cross the line in a big way.

Then there is government agent Jonathan Keyes (Omari Hardwick), who has surprising knowledge and unsettling theories about the xenomorph.

Writer/director Matthew Loren Oates has some good ideas, but they seldom cohere properly. Part of the problem may be that Croak is never fully given a personality, even though we spend some “alone time” with them. We gather from Renee’s interactions and from the general direction of the storytelling what Croak will do under given circumstances, but that’s not the same thing.

Another matter is that although the combination of plot elements is novel, taken individually, the themes and their treatment are readily recognizable. The most original scenes here are those with Hardwick’s carrot-and-stick intelligence officer, who gets unpredictable dialogue to go with his behavior.

XENO feels like a sincere effort to do something different with the terrestrial human/inarticulate extraterrestrial interaction sci-fi subgenre. It succeeds in being unusual, but it doesn’t wholly gel.

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Part E.T., part monster movie, part domestic drama

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