The flat-lining, alien-abduction thriller “The Fourth Kind” buries an interesting idea under a barrage of gimmicky hokum. The movie's unwieldy mix of pseudo-documentary footage and “Unsolved Mystery”-style re-enactments is as unconvincing as it is distancing.

“The Fourth Kind” opens with Milla Jovovich introducing herself as an “actress,” the first of many dubious claims the film makes. Jovovich tells us she'll be playing Dr. Abigail Emily Tyler and that all the trauma we're about to see can be supported by documented records and interviews.

We're immediately whisked to a conversation with the “real” Dr. Abigail Tyler, a saucer-eyed zombie woman haunted by extremely disturbing events occurring nine years ago.

Tyler and her husband, both psychologists, are investigating some strange coincidences in Nome, Alaska. Patients report waking up at 3 a.m., feeling apprehensive and seeing snowy owls with really big eyes. The film presents these events in split-screen, with the “real,” raw videotaped footage of the patients' recollections playing side-by-side with the actors' reconstructions.

Tyler puts her patients under hypnosis, where she discovers that the nocturnal birds aren't the only things coming out at night. We also see the “real” Dr. Tyler, talking to “Fourth Kind” writer-director Olatunde Osunsanmi on a set at Southern California's Chapman University, recalling how her psychological study gradually unraveled when she got a little too close to The Truth.

In “The Fourth Kind,” that truth is loopy in a way that's completely unintended. Osunsanmi, whose only other movie is the awful “The Cavern,” invests so much time and energy trying to convince the audience of the events' veracity that he forgets to create even a rudimentary sense of tension.

The film pulls off a couple of jump-cut shockers, despite the disparity between Jovovich's sleep-inducing performance and the overacting of the “real” Dr. Tyler.

Supporting actors Elias Koteas and Will Patton clearly took their cues from the latter. One wonders if their hammy dramatizations are supposed to be commentary on the “Unsolved Mystery” School of Acting.

If so, the intent, like everything else in this half-baked mess, is lost in the slog.