Alien spirits from outer space land on earth and take over the bodies of the recently deceased–but their purpose isn’t what it would appear to be.
Director: Aurelio Chiesa. AKA Distant Lights
Stars: Tomas Milian, Laura Morante, William Berger, Giacomo Piperno, Susanna Martinková, Mirella Falco, David Flosi, Isabelle Illiers, Bertina Ciampolini, Salvatore Jacono.
Thank you!
Quirky, low-budget Italian sci-fi film that starts off promisingly –charming little boy actor David Flosi playing off Tomas Milian as his dad Bernardo, a doctor.. The son Giuliano begins having visions of his late mother playing with him in the park near the old brick ruins on the hill. The skeptical father doesn’t believe in apparitions of the dead (he needs to go read some of the voluminous accounts in the parapsychology literature about this phenomenon and numerous other phenomena persuasively indicating survival of the soul beyond death). But then he sees her one night, too.
From here the story goes in another direction– away from the beautiful metaphysical possibilities of a soul visiting from the Great Beyond– and instead becomes a sci-fi flick about gentle aliens from another civilization who’ve somehow lost their bodies to a catastrophe and are now hovering above Earth to see about the viability of incarnating in the “discarded” but salvageable bodies of recently deceased humans.
There’s a lot of “poetic license” needed for viewers to find any of this at all plausible.
A touching element is added when little Giuliano’s substitute school teacher Renata (Laura Morante) helps the widowed dad with his son, but then she dies. And of course her body becomes the vehicle for the alien walk-in who had inhabited Bernardo’s late wife’s body (which has more recently been destroyed in an car crash).
So now Bernardo has lost two lovely human female companions– his beloved wife and his new lover Renata– but in exchange he’s gained an odd relationship with a pleasant alien who quickly learns to like mothering, domestic chores, glasses of wine, and (virginal) sex with Bernardo.
Meanwhile other recently dead humans are being inhabited by other benevolent aliens, greatly confusing the local head of police and the small town’s mayor.
And then all the aliens one day suddenly depart.
Or do they? There’s a quirky surprise at film’s close with yet another female.
This likely could have been a more touching film had the story explored a Spiritualist / spiritual aspect about undying souls continuing to love their embodied souls on Earth, but the sci-fi slant seems more far-fetched and therefore less moving.
But that may just be my tastes and resonances.
I suppose the bottom-line morale of the story is that conscious life (personal consciousnesses or souls), wherever they call “home,” whether they’re associated with Earth or some other physical or subtle-plane realm, will always be looking for body-vehicles for learning, relating and expressing,