Based on a play by Tomohiro Maekawa, Before We Vanish-its Japanese title means "Strolling Invaders"-may not be prime Kurosawa, and it's oddly uneven in tone, but it has an ease about it that's intensely engaging.

As an experiment in blending the minute character observations of Kurosawa's dramas into a pure genre plot, Before We Vanish does succeed.

It's a quirky hybrid of a film that mostly works, thanks to some fine performances and by a script to goes in unexpected directions.

You’ll love the aliens—even root real hard for them—more than you will the humans (predictably, but also, “welcome to urf”), and that’s more than anybody can say for a whole bunch of humans-are-worse-than-aliens narratives we’ve seen before.