The Wirksworth UFO Incident (2025)

Directed by Stuart Wheeldon

2025

Nine Ladies Productions

Stuart Wheeldon’s The Wirksworth UFO Incident is an interesting proposition. Taking the form of a documentary about extraterrestrial experiences across Derbyshire, it ebbs and flows across its 70-minute runtime; never quite building up enough tension to truly hold the audience but made with such clear passion that you can’t help but be intrigued by Wheeldon’s next project.

What’s clear is that Wheeldon does not want to fall into cliché and so avoids sequences that would be common in the sci-fi/horror canon. This film deals with the shock and trauma of seeing something unexplainable, and through its lead performance from Nigel Barber excels in this. Barber plays Arthur Peterson – an American who returns to Wirksworth to confront what he experienced decades before.

There’s a vulnerability to his performance, as he struggles to comprehend what he potentially saw, the fear and paranoia that comes from being targeted by an unknown, and the fact that so few people have come forward to say they saw the same thing. The rest of the cast, including Lotte Bell, Ben Porter, Ray Redmond and Nicola Rees, also do an excellent job. The task of portraying deep emotional torment when you’re monologuing to the camera should not be overstated.

Yet the style of the film comes with a lot of issues. In between the to-camera character pieces, Wheeldon intercuts stock images – some of which looks to be of the artificial kind, although this is just speculation. Not only does segmenting the film into monologues and still imagery hamper the pacing, but it also gives the editing nowhere to hide. There are points where the to-camera bits are quite clearly cut and this could have been hidden behind B-roll footage with a voiceover track.

It also means that this is a fictional documentary that stays so true to the documentary style that it falls apart as a feature film. Late in the film, Dr Vance (Geraint Thomason) explains that Derbyshire has been a relative hotbed for UFO experiences in the UK, and references a large black triangle seen over Bakewell in 1993 and a hovering pink object over Bonsall in 2000.

These are real allegations of UFO sightings, the latter of which had camcorder evidence. Given Wheeldon’s creative choice to use the documentary format, you wonder why he didn’t just make a documentary. A quick internet search finds more Derbyshire occurrences, including one at Dark Peak in 1997, and more over Nottingham in 1991.

Using real experiences, it would have heightened the emotional backdrop and could have still brought in much of the same research, including the meaning behind Wirksworth’s StarDisc installation.

Instead, we have a film that hampers its own progress, forced to insert an unsatisfying finale to meet the requirements of a fictional film, when a true documentary could have been far more interesting to the audience.

★★½



2.5 / 5

Matthew Tilt

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