Nicholas Roeg‘s wonderful, elegiac sci-fi film The Man Who Fell To Earth, returns to a cinema near you tonight, and what a joy that is. Full of the idiosyncratic visual style that marked Roeg’s career and, of course, starring the equally distinctive David Bowie, this is a film which demands patience from the viewer if its accumulated effects are to take hold.

Thomas Jerome Newton (Bowie) is an alien who lands on earth in order to source water for his home planet. Newton’s technologically advanced mind enables him to build an empire with the aim of transporting the precious water. However, in the process Newton becomes inevitably wrapped up in our distinctly human concerns – and vices – which threaten his mission.

This is no ordinary sci-fi, for Roeg is no ordinary filmmaker. The film progresses both slowly and quickly; Newton’s ascent to an indecently wealthy position happens in a flash, yet the film doesn’t rely on a conventional narrative approach, meaning that at times viewing can be a laboured process. It is a film which feels more like a combination of ideas and visual poetry loosely strung together on a flimsy science-fiction narrative for the convenience of allowing these ideas freedom from earthly logic.

Some such sequences are triumphs of genius; others stretch our patience to the limit. An early example of the former arrives early on in the film. Newton visits a Japanese eatery, where a performance featuring kimonos and samurai swords entertains the diners. Roeg’s roving and zooming camera, makes us feel dizzy and interjects tension into an otherwise gentle scene. This is also cut together with a sex scene, as a couple cavort around roughly while taking pictures of the act in gloriously defined colour – made possible by Newton’s new technology. The cleverness of this juxtaposition of time and space is to foreshadow Newton’s uncomfortable relationship with human desire; its violence and lurid composition are more suggested by the editing and camera-work than actually on the screen.