Curator Watchlist
A surreal, melancholy sci-fi art film with striking imagery and a deeply alienated central performance. It’s more about mood, corruption, and loneliness than plot mechanics, so it rewards viewers open to an experimental, dreamlike pace.
Where to watch: Buy
Thu · 2h 19m
Director: Nicolas Roeg
Starring: David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark
Thomas Jerome Newton is an alien who has come to Earth in search of water to save his home planet. Aided by lawyer Oliver Farnsworth, Thomas uses his knowledge of advanced technology to create profitable inventions. While developing a method to transport water, Thomas meets Mary-Lou, a quiet hotel clerk, and begins to fall in love with her. Just as he is ready to leave Earth, Thomas is intercepted by the U.S. government, and his entire plan is threatened.
Nicolas Roeg
David Bowie, Rip Torn, Candy Clark
A surreal, melancholy sci-fi art film with striking imagery and a deeply alienated central performance. It’s more about mood, corruption, and loneliness than plot mechanics, so it rewards viewers open to an experimental, dreamlike pace.
Nicolas Roeg turns a simple premise into a feverish study of displacement, appetite, and decay. The film’s power comes less from its plot than from its atmosphere: a drifting, uneasy sense that Earth itself is a trap, and that human systems are as alien as anything in space. David Bowie’s casting is perfect for that idea, giving Newton a beauty that feels fragile, remote, and strangely tragic.
The movie is at its best when it lets images and fragments do the work. Roeg’s editing, the glassy surfaces, the sexual unease, and the constant sense of consumption all build a portrait of a being slowly absorbed by the culture he hoped to exploit. It can feel shaggy and opaque, but that looseness is part of its spell.
This is not a crowd-pleasing sci-fi adventure. It’s a haunting, sometimes abrasive mood piece that lingers because it treats alien contact as a story about addiction, loneliness, and the failure of transcendence. If you’re in the right frame of mind, it’s unforgettable.
Graham Williamson (5★) · 1545 likes
"Look up here, I'm in danger." It is 1976, and David Bowie is in trouble. The record company is hammering on his door for Young Americans 2, and all the songs he's writing are lengthy, bleak, and fixated on occult and religious symbolism. He is subsisting on a diet of milk, peppers and cocaine, and preserves his chalk-coloured complexion by never opening the curtains of his house. He has recently completed a film - his first major feature - and… more
fiend4mojitos (4★) · 1180 likes
I don't know what they were on in that editing room but I want some
Cinemonster (5★) · 1088 likes
The stars look very different today.
Lola Landekić (2★) · 961 likes
I wish there was a way to watch this movie without watching this movie.
Nea Ching(y) (4.5★) · 768 likes
if david bowie touched me, i would also pee myself
A meditative sci-fi film that treats space as a psychological and emotional landscape rather than a technical one.
For viewers who respond to slow-burn, philosophical science fiction with an uncanny, dreamlike atmosphere.
A landmark of cosmic ambiguity, visual grandeur, and existential sci-fi that values sensation over exposition.
Shares the hallucinatory, body-and-consciousness experimentation and a willingness to get weird.
An eerie, lonely sci-fi story about isolation and the collapse of ordinary reality.
Another uncanny 1970s film where mystery, symbolism, and dread outweigh conventional plotting.
Roeg’s other essential mood piece, built from grief, fragmentation, and unsettling visual rhythms.
A radical, transgressive study of identity and performance with a similarly hallucinatory edge.
For its surreal imagery, spiritual weirdness, and assaultive, symbolic style.
A bleak, dream-logic descent into bodily unease and alienation.
Paranoia, identity collapse, and a claustrophobic sense of being consumed by the environment.
A cool, oppressive sci-fi vision about dehumanization and systems that erase individuality.
alienation, identity, corruption by consumer culture, loneliness, homesickness, addiction, sexual ambiguity, technology and capitalism
1970s sci-fi, art-house, psychedelic, surreal, melancholy, experimental editing, existential, cult classic, dreamlike, alien contact