Review of The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) by Kevin N — 12 Oct 2011

Nicolas Roeg is a body director; meaning, Nic Roeg lets his actors' bodies do the talking, and his infamously frank depictions of sexuality speak far louder than his usually very dull dialogue. I admire this but I don't think the technique always fits the films he makes, and this is one movie that sometimes suffers very badly from it.

Roeg gave David Bowie his first acting gig for this film and he is its greatest asset. He is strange enough to play the part of the alien, yet he stares through Roeg's camera with an undeniably human quality, creating a haunting portrait of lost loneliness that just cannot be achieved via the latex of E.

T. several years later. Still, it's hard to find that beautiful isolation amidst Roeg's spaced out direction. It is as if he only had a few vague ideas of sequences he wanted to create and decided to go with all of them, and then decided in post that he liked little chunks of all of them.

It's a messy picture that switches between sheer visual brilliance (the simplicity of the scenes on the "other planet" are magnificent) and artistic flatulence. I also found Candy Clark's performance atrocious, an amateurish wreck of a display that goes from bad to worse as the picture progresses.

'The Man Who Fell to Earth' now has a cult status, and it seems stuck in a strange limbo between true shlock and heady genius; it's a film that simply cannot be "figured out", and perhaps that's why it attracts so many repeat followers.