First things first: a film that begins with a thank you to the mayor of Atlanta and the governor of Georgia, immediately propositioning the audience with a fantasy of verisimilitude and access, and then immediately cuts to a totally opaque, ethereal non-space while an elderly John Huston, fresh off of voicing Gandalf in the animated Rankin & Bass The Hobbit,  appears as an unknown prophet on an alien planet that looks like Mos Eisley, isn’t ever going to lose me completely. We seem not to be in Kansas anymore, and this high up in the sublime tornado of chaotic-evil cinema, we’re probably doomed to fall.

Yet, amazingly, The Visitor holds up its end of the bargain. It is only when we cut to a basketball game that the real mystery of the film reveals itself: how is it that essentially unknown director Giulio Paradisi never made another horror film, and his subsequent two films were apparently easy-going Italian comedies, before he unceremoniously never directed again?  The Visitor’s opening basketball game is a beautifully opaque textual object, a killer opening to a film that is a bricolage of genres and textures and uncanny thematic and technical juxtapositions revealing a director of real mettle and a vision of extraordinary curiosity. This is a stupendously unsettling game of hoops, a cut-up event in which the camera floats around with haunting observational acuity, like a deconstruction of a sporting event from a ghost’s alienated perspective.

Perhaps even more interesting: a latter combination gymnastics event/bullet-removal surgery sequence (you know, one of those type-deals) clarifies that much of The Visitor is an experiment in mobilizing giallo-style filmmaking for primarily non-kill sequences. While some of the set-pieces do technically result in dead bodies, as in a phenomenal bird-in-a-car dive bomb, even they are far-removed from the giallo’s usual stalking ground. Instead, we explore everything from public sporting events to overcrowded hospitals to an abandoned apartment building to the innards of machinery scaffolding, each of which the film turns into a genuinely ethereal cinematic experiment in sheer observation.

 These are prime examples of what Stanley Kubrick once called “non-submersible units,” sequences that work as arias of cinematic construction all their own, dances of bodies and cameras in sheer space that exist, for the duration of their construction, as wholly themselves. During an out-of-nowhere ice-skating sequence, for instance, the camera frames a would-be assault as a spontaneous ballet. In another, we skulk around the protagonist’s house before we realize that we haven’t the foggiest idea who, or what, is doing the stalking at a shot-by-shot level. A sequence in a fun-house turns the mirrors into a harmony of shattered glass. A hospital sequence drifts through the corridors, catching whiffs of a society that cannot contain its own systemic failures, and people literally walking in front of the frame, keeping this story from moving on without at least acknowledging them. Throughout, the camera recurrently glides and stumbles in front of obstacles positioned between us and the characters, evoking a sense of perpetual movement toward possible clarity that is, in fact, just another blockage in a jammed-up world. The camera seems, paradoxically, to be both possessed with preternatural intelligence and essentially incapable, cosmically aware of forces that are beyond our clearest comprehension and yet, somehow, staring into a constant abyss beyond its ability to grasp.

Admittedly, the film itself doesn’t always hold up its end of the bargain when it comes to legitimizing these sequences. The film is, for one, absolutely too scatter-brained to even glance at anything resembling a real “thesis” that begins in a particular scene and then develops in another and then concludes.  But The Visitor makes it hard to tell what “thesis” actually means anymore, and why on earth a good soul might want one. We are in the company of some simply breathtaking late-‘70s nonsense, an Italianette gloss on the U.S. that also feels like an ur-text of the decade’s cultural detritus, a sort of mad scientist’s recombinant creature splicing the DNA of the decade’s popular fears and pet antagonisms into an unholy cinematic monstrosity. The psychic-satanic child obviously recalls The Omen, and the adult satanists of Rosemary’s Baby are always skulking about, as are the alien fears of Close Encounters. The ominous bird doesn’t recall American-style ecological horror so much as a giallo-esque fixation with obscure killer entities, as though the forces of sheer existence are assaulting us. But, in that very register, it also squints at Hitchcock’s The Birds just for the hell of it. All these references don’t really suggest that the film knows these things were meant to resonate with U.S. cultural concerns, so much as that The Visitor just likes screwing around in the vicinity of other films, but at least The Visitor isn’t so conceited to imply that it knows any better than we do.

You’ll note that I haven’t mentioned much in the way of a story or the characters, and that’s because the film itself doesn’t. There’s an absurdist prologue where an unnamed Christ-analogue (Franco Nero) summons a prophet who will go by the name Jerzy Colsowicz and who is played by none other than John Huston, to investigate sheer evil in the form of youthful Katy Collins (Paige Conner), who is the child of the bluntly named, copyright-avoidant Zatteen. From there, we’re immediately tangled in a torturous weave of tenuously linked cosmic red tape. Katy is, apparently, to be weaponized by a group of satanists headed by Dr. Walker (Mel Ferrer) who hold some sway over Raymond Armstead (Lance Henrisken), who runs the Atlanta Hawks, but why and to what ends is never explained. Come to think of it, she might really be the one weaponizing them? Shelley Winters, Glenn Ford, and Sam Peckinpah also join the fun for a few scenes each. None of their “characters,” if they can be called that, clearly reveal their desires or intentions, but they are, after all, played by Shelley Winters, Glenn Ford, and Sam Peckinpah, because sometimes we can have nice things.

I, for one, could not possibly tell you what the diegetic relationship between almost any of these characters is. But when Hurston and Winters are talking to one another in a kind of effluvial void of science fiction colors and sounds, doused in a soothing but malevolent blue light of no particular diegetic origin, you feel like asking the film to stop and breathe a bit to explain itself would just amount to bothering it. Without these actors, the film might genuinely have no soul, but these are two of the warmest and most humane performances you’ll ever find in a film that can’t bother to explain how they know one another, or what they want, or whether they are even playing the same character on a scene-by-scene basis, or whether those characters are even humans.

It’s all, finally, a lot of nothing in the final analysis, but Paradisi makes a lot out of nothing. A scene where Huston conducts a cosmic orchestra is obviously “here” only because a similar sequence famously climaxed Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but while that film meditated on the possibility of cosmic connection across differences of space and time, this one makes a delicious mockery of any hope of understanding. I’m not claiming that this film actually intends or knows that this difference is there, or that it matters, but sometimes you just have to go for it and trust that the ride will take you somewhere worth going, or at least that most of the stops along the way will have the good conscience to try to knock your head loose before you move along and go about your day.

Score: 7/10