The Wild Blue Yonder

Director: Werner Herzog

2005 / 80min / DCP

Brad Dourif portrays an unnamed extraterrestrial hailing from the Andromeda system in Herzog’s entrancing and frequently whimsical docufiction hybrid—described in its credits as a “science fiction fantasy”—which matches Dourif’s direct-to-camera narration of his life since arriving on Earth in search of a new home with a baffling array of imagery that includes footage taken beneath the arctic ice, archival newsreels, original interviews with top mathematicians, and reports from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, creatively used to illustrate his outlandish tale. Among the finest and most original of films in Herzog’s return-to-form 21st-century run, including an otherworldly score by jazz cellist Ernst Reijseger, Senegalese vocalist Mola Sylla, and the Sardinian choir Tenore e Cuncordu de Orosei.