The Man from Planet X is certainly not the greatest work of director Edgar G. Ulmer, but it may be his greatest work. The Black Cat and Detour are stone-cold minimalist masterpieces. The former is an enigmatic, lacerating post-mortem of World War I’s phantasmagorical hold on the 20^th century, a past that was no past at all. The latter is a soul-crushing existential excavation of an aimless present, a portrait of mid-century Americana going around and around to nowhere. Man from Planet X turns the dial forward to a new decade and a new set of concerns: a ‘50s film about ’50s anxieties done up in ‘50s Poverty Row ramshackle-ness, a sci-fi potboiler about an alien creature lost amidst foreign souls. This being, the titular Man from Planet X, has nothing to survive on: he can’t even communicate with anyone around him, yet he manages to command dozens of people nonetheless. This abject outsider, working with nothing yet exercising unexpected power nonetheless, could be a melancholic echo of Ulmer himself, and his alienated entity of a film.

Perhaps the most primordial display of his talents, The Man from Planet X stands, literally, on only Ulmer’s skill and nothing more. This film barely exists, and its bareness is poetic, a mise en abyme of reality laid bare, an abyss with absolutely nothing up its sleeve. “Yet they have a grim beauty of their own,” a character remarks, and you can see Ulmer’s dejection about his career trajectory slowly etch into a grin at a description of his own oeuvre.

It’s, truthfully, not much of a film. The “human” acting is rote, and there’s a human villain whose facial hair suggests a Satanist or Nietzschean simply because. The ideas on paper aren’t that different from any corner store poverty row feature attuned superficially to the cultural zeitgeist and to the necessity of channeling that zeitgeist into a 10% return on investment. But when the lights dim, this vision of a European expat thrown into an all-devouring Hollywood machine, a stranger in a strange land who might illuminate America’s fate for itself, evokes something genuine about both the improbability and necessity of communication in a way that, frankly, feels more thoughtfully aware of the frustrating opacity of communication than, say, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival would 65 years later. As the humans, so rote and mechanical in this film, communicate with another ship, a traveler from another world who can barely move and seems so much more alive and curious than they, the film lays bare humanity’s capacity to engage one another.

Within the Cold War context, Man casts a dim, damning light back on humanity’s capacity to engage one another. The text’s sheer businesslike barrenness creates a void, an empty room on the outskirts of modernity where the fate of humanity might be inextricably altered, or where a stray dog may simply wander to die, cast aside by a nation that only cared when it was convenient. It proposes that our aloneness in the universe has nothing to do with whether other species exist, or whether they visit us. Planet X suggests an unoccupied planet, and, in its near avant-garde hollowness, the work itself is a drifting film doomed never to return home.

Score: 7.5/10