The story opens with a hatchling in a nest pushing an unhatched egg and another hatchling out of the nest. Now alone, the mother bird returns and feeds it. It is soon clear that this hatchling is not the same species of bird. It is a Cuckoo, a species known for laying eggs in the nests of other birds.
Elsewhere, Gemma (Imogen Poots) is teaching her class of elementary students how to be trees in the wind. After class, she and boyfriend Tom (Jesse Eisenberg) go looking for a house. Though the salesman seems like a goof, they drive out to the Yonder housing development with him to look at a house. Every house looks identical. The house is furnished but, while looking at the backyard, Martin vanishes. His car is gone. Bizarre! They laugh and shrug then get in their car to leave. Hours later, they have still not found their way out of the housing development and the car runs out of gas in front of the very house they viewed. All efforts to leave always find them back at the same house. Then they find a baby in a box with a note. The note says "raise the child and you will be released."
An interesting Twilight Zone premise that doesn't satisfy. The boy grows at an alarming rate - he is like a 9 or 10 year-old boy after 3 months - but they are clearly not raising him. Mostly they just feed him. The boy is a mimic, able to quote back Tom and Gemma in their own voices. He asks for attention as if he were still an infant, shrieking until his needs are met. Tom and Gemma offer no discipline, only helplessness. They never named the boy, merely calling him 'the boy.'
What is missing is an explanation. Who are the 'people' who abduct human couples to raise these quick-growing offspring? Why is this child-rearing strategy a logical choice for a vastly more advanced species? It's like the scriptwriter said 'wouldn't it be cool if an alien species acted like a Cuckoo?' and then never developed the story beyond that.
Overall, it goes nowhere. Skip.
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