Josh Lewis’s review published on Letterboxd:
An absolutely bonkers close encounters science-fiction drama that briefly appears like it might be operating in the Spielberg of dorky alien meets family drama, only to give way to one of the most baffling and uncontrolled leading man performances in the Christopher Walken catalog (which considering the rest of the catalog is saying something!) who is tasked with vividly recreating the alleged real-life abduction/anal-probing experiences of accomplished 70s/80s horror author Whitley Strieber (The Hunger, Wolfen) who is adapting his own "non-fiction" memoir, and from there morphing into both a tonally bizarre repressed traumatic memory psychological horror film and a strange arthouse drama about seeing another dimension, (another plane of existence, a face/mask of god, etc), and instead of being anxious/confused about it learning to embrace it, live with it, and maybe even write some best-selling books about it.
As a result of the material being so strangely personal and from the mind of an obviously deranged man/true believer, the domestic drama of the film and the genre filmmaking craft can often feel oddly calibrated, meaning that what otherwise might be meant as “normal”, “ordinary” domestic scenes with his family are so dominated by Walken’s extreme tics and mannerisms they don’t ever that way, and the abduction sequences are so “authentic” to Whitley’s claims and clearly realized with an insufficient special FX budget that they come off goofy as hell. At one point after being raped by the little puppet creature guys (the standard greys + some other various trolls and munchkins) he kisses, high fives and dances with them?! Also features one of the most peculiar depictions of the creative process of an author I’ve ever seen, includes a middle hour that is almost entirely made up of hypnosis memory therapy sessions to relive scenes we’ve already seen in more detail, and for some reason a large part of the soundtrack is moody and romantic electric guitar wailing courtesy of Eric Clapton?
