Film

A Viennese photographer sees the world go haywire before her eyes as a band of sinister space aliens take over the brains of her fellow citizens. Austrian multimedia visionary Valie Export’s debut feature is this avant-garde sci-fi satire incorporating elements of video and performance art. It’s a subversive, hallucinatory essay on gender and sexuality that plays “as if the Godard of Numéro Deux was reincarnated as a woman and decided to make a feminist version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (Amy Taubin).

The rare remake to equal—and perhaps surpass—the original, this disturbing update of the 1950s science fiction classic charts the fear that tears through a San Francisco community when alien pod people begin replacing the residents. Steeped in the paranoid atmosphere of 1970s conspiracy thrillers, this Invasion infuses the premise with visceral shocks and a provocative exploration of distrust and dehumanization in the era of Vietnam and Watergate.