I’d been looking forward to this one for weeks. After Die Präsenz, Daniele Grieco had earned the benefit of the doubt — that film proved that German found footage could punch well above its weight. The question was whether he could do it again with completely different material. Aliens instead of ghosts. Forest instead of haunted house. Science fiction dread instead of supernatural atmosphere.
The answer came within the first few minutes. This review expands on our original German review from 2016 — updated and rewritten for our English audience.
UFO – Es ist hier! (2016)
The Story: Five film students are shooting a documentary at a local zoo when the animals start behaving strangely — panicking, as if something has frightened them. Moments later, a massive fireball tears across the sky and crashes somewhere in the forest nearby. The students decide to drive to the crash site. They find it. They spend the night. By morning, one of them is missing — and what’s out there in the dark is not a meteorite.
🎬 Our opinion: Grieco does it again. UFO — Es ist hier! grabs you from the opening scene and doesn’t let go. Excellent performances, a sustained atmosphere of dread, and a relentless second half that barely gives you time to breathe. One of the best alien-themed found footage films out there — and one of the most underrated German horror films of the decade.
Director: Daniele Grieco · Cast: Laura Berlin, Dennis Mojen, Leonard Hohm, Olga von Luckwald, Jan Walter
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Five film students have a problem. Their thesis documentary was supposed to be about a local zoo — safe, straightforward, low-risk. But during filming, something starts going wrong. The animals are agitated in a way that doesn’t make sense. Birds scatter. Enclosures erupt. Something is upsetting them, and nobody can see what.
Then the fireball appears. A massive burning object streaking across the sky, crashing somewhere in the forest a few kilometres away. The students watch it happen on camera. And after a very short discussion — the kind of short discussion that only happens in horror films — they decide to go and find it.
The crash site is real. Burnt trees. Scorched earth. Something clearly came down here. Too late in the day for proper footage, they make camp and plan to shoot in the morning. But when morning comes, there are only four of them left. And whatever is in that forest with them has no intention of letting the others go either.
The UFO — Es ist hier! Trailer
Review: UFO — Es ist hier! (Spoiler-Free)
You know within the first few minutes whether a found footage film is going to work. It’s something about the way the actors hold the camera, the way they talk to each other — whether the conversations feel like performances or like people. UFO — Es ist hier! passes that test immediately. The opening zoo sequence feels completely real, and by the time the fireball appears, you’re already invested in these five people in a way that takes many found footage films an entire act to achieve.
Credit for that belongs almost entirely to the cast. All five actors are consistently convincing — no one breaks character, no one seems to be reciting lines, and the fear that arrives in the second half of the film reads as genuine rather than performed. This is harder than it looks. Found footage is a brutally unforgiving format for weak performances, and UFO has none.
Grieco’s direction is equally assured. He understands something that many found footage directors don’t — that stillness is scarier than movement. Rather than relying on constant handheld chaos, he frequently has his characters set the camera down, letting it observe from a fixed position. The forest sits there in the background, dark and quiet and wrong. Nothing happens. And then something does. The contrast between those moments of calm and the eruptions of terror that follow is what gives the film its real punch.
The atmosphere builds from the very first scene. That mysterious undercurrent — the sense that something is out there, watching, waiting — never fully dissipates, even in the quieter stretches. And just when you think you might have a moment to catch your breath, the film moves again. I found myself repeatedly postponing the urge to pause: every time I thought the coast was clear, it wasn’t.
The alien angle is handled with genuine restraint. Grieco isn’t interested in showing you his creature in full — he’s interested in what you don’t see, what you can’t explain, what the camera captures at the edges of its field of view. The influences are worn openly (Alien, Blair Witch, the classic creature-in-the-dark tradition of 1980s sci-fi horror), but the film earns its place in that lineage rather than simply borrowing from it.
There are one or two moments where the reason the camera is still running isn’t entirely convincing — a familiar found footage problem, and a minor one here. But it’s the only wobble in an otherwise tightly constructed film.
Did you know?
Grieco’s alien obsession has roots. In an interview with Found Footage Critic, director Daniele Grieco explained that the inspiration for UFO — Es ist hier! came from a specific frustration: he felt there had never been a truly great found footage film about aliens. “Although Cloverfield was about an alien and a very impressive one at that,” he said, “it wasn’t a real found footage movie in my eyes.”
His biggest cinematic influence for the film was Alien (1979), which terrified him as a twelve-year-old watching it against his parents’ wishes — and whose approach to off-screen dread he deliberately tried to replicate. The film was shot with a single camera throughout, a deliberate choice that mirrors the approach of his previous film Die Präsenz (2014) and helps maintain the credibility of the found footage conceit. Grieco wrote, directed, produced, and edited the film himself.
Verdict
UFO — Es ist hier! is found footage at its most confident. A strong premise, a cast that sells every moment, a director who knows exactly when to hold back and when to strike — and a sustained tension that barely lets up across its 82-minute runtime. Grieco has now done it twice. That’s not luck.
If you’re looking for alien-themed found footage that actually works, your search ends here.
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Powered by JustWatchSimilar Movies to UFO — Es ist hier!
If the combination of found footage and something not of this world is what you’re after, these films occupy the same territory — though none of them do it quite as well.
Die Präsenz (2014) — Grieco’s debut and the film that announced him as a serious voice in the genre. A group of students spends a night in a reportedly haunted house for a university experiment. Different threat, same DNA: a single camera, a creeping atmosphere, and a director who understands that restraint is more frightening than spectacle. Start here if you haven’t already.
Alien Abduction (2014) — An American family on a camping trip in North Carolina encounters something in the woods that defies explanation. Shot on a single camera by one of the family’s children, it’s one of the more convincing alien-themed found footage films to come out of the US, with a strong sense of location and genuine escalation.
The McPherson Tape (1989) — The original alien found footage film, shot on video two decades before the subgenre had a name. A family dinner is interrupted by what appears to be a UFO landing in the field outside. Rough, strange, and still unsettling — more important as a piece of found footage history than it is as a horror film, but worth tracking down.
Exists (2014) — Eduardo Sánchez returns to the Texas forest with a creature-in-the-woods film that shares UFO‘s commitment to a single camera and practical dread. Bigfoot rather than aliens, but the same fundamentals: something is out there, you can’t see it clearly, and the characters have no good options.
