If I told you there were a science fiction story in which god is an alien satellite that beams information to a cabal of alternate-America dissidents with instructions on how to take down a Nixonian tyrant whose initials are FFF—as in 666—who’s in fact a Manchurian Candidate-esque sleeper agent for the Communist party, and that they do so by writing books and releasing subversive records with subliminally revolutionary messages, well, you might ask me, where would I find such a batshit amazing story? And I would say: in the pages of Philip K. Dick’s Radio Free Albemuth, the paperbacker’s posthumously published semiautobiographical first attempt to deal with his peculiar late-70s religious awakening, which consumed the rest of his writing life: three novels known as the VALIS trilogy, starting with VALIS.

VALIS, an acronym for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, appears in Radio Free, and Radio Free appears in VALIS: Dick condensed the former’s plot to create the latter’s movie-within-a-book. So it makes sense for fans to turn it into a film, and anyway, good luck adapting VALIS for the screen, with its blocks of bolded exegesis and its imaginary characters; this yarn is packed with crazy ideas and tight sci-fi plotting, pitting “alien-controlled subversives” against a fascist USA crushing dissent post-Soviet collapse. The radical politics and far-out Gnostic theology—like, the Roman Empire never ended; it’s holding us all prisoner, and the passage of time is an illusion—is transmitted via pink light to Nicholas Brady (Jonathan Scarfe), a record-store clerk turned corporate exec, who exhausts his wife (Katheryn Winnick) with his theories but intrigues his old pal, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (Shea Whigham). Alanis Morisette turns up to sing a song in a VALIS vision, then as a secretary who introduces them to the underground resistance.

The problem is that the movie is notable only for its source material—not for what it does with it. Dickheads will find it a curiosity, while outsiders might have their interest piqued by the peculiar politico-religious dystopia. But everyone ought to be flummoxed by the chintzy special effects, reminiscent of computer graphics of the late 80s—think of a more primitive version of the Treehouse of Horror episode “Homer³”—and the garish visual “progress” they promised. (The film has been in the works for a decade, finished four years ago, but just now getting a proper theatrical release.)

They’re so awful you have to suspect it’s intentional, that it’s supposed to evoke the time period in which the film is set, though that doesn’t explain the anachronistically modern indie music that has 1980s record companies so excited. (Seriously, the Robyn Hitchcock-penned “Let’s Party,” the film’s “hit single” supposed to take down the president, might be the most morose, least fun party song ever.) Also anachronistic is the underlying ideology, Dick’s cosmic, godlike intelligence conspicuously born of post-Watergate paranoia and late Cold War outerspace anxiety. Refreshingly, though, Dick did something almost no baby boomer ever has: he put his faith in the next generation, maybe because he had to—because he recognized that his had failed.

Agatha Christie meets theoretical physics in this strange and gripping mystery in which universes are colliding—or, more aptly, multiverses are overlapping. The trouble begins innocently enough when Emily Foxler’s iPhone screen spontaneously shatters on her way to a dinner party, attended by her Angeleno-type friends: actors, dancers, empaths, a little less recognizable and thus a little less sympathetic than the best genre-film protagonists. (It’s hosted by the lovable Nicholas Brendon, playing a fictionalized version of himself as the former star of, uh, Roswell.) The same fate will befall another cell phone, as well as a wine glass; no one has service, the web is down, and then the electricity goes out. Blame it on the unknowable space power of celestial objects: it’s all the fault of a passing comet, which, one character explains, have historically been known to cause not just mechanical but psychological disturbances when they pass too close to Earth.

It gets worse than a little cracked glass and malfunctional electronics, though. In last year’s wonderful +1, an asteroid magically caused doubles disjointed in time to crash an epic teenage house party, with characters running into versions of themselves from 20 minutes ago. This movie makes a nice companion piece to that philosophy textbook thought experiment, except it approaches something closer to +5,000,000, as every choice the characters make, even the tiniest ones, opens up an alternate reality, into which they then pass unwittingly or not through a patch of darkness outside. It’s like Schroedinger’s Cat if the possible realities didn’t collapse into one actuality when you opened the box, instead continuing to exist simultaneously when that should be impossible—and then multiplying! Or, as one character explains (to simplify it for everyone), it’s sort of like that Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors.

The action is set entirely in and around a single house, its confinement approaching theatricality; it’s low-budget, a sci-fi not of spectacle but of complex plotting, twisty and surprising in the tradition of 2004’s time-travel twister Primer. “We can’t trust ourselves,” one character says, as the ones who aren’t slipping into other realities without noticing are spying on those that are. It’s doppelganger against doppelganger, the number of universes approaching the infinite as their inhabitants become increasingly paranoid. This is the film’s most damning idea: if we’re afraid of our “alternate” selves, isn’t it just because we know ourselves—and the awful things we’re capable of?

Willow Creek
Directed by Bobcat Goldthwait

The centerpiece of this found-footage Blair Witch redux is destined for inclusion in horror movie textbooks: an uncut, fixed-position, no-budget 18-minute shot of two characters in a tent, out in remote wilderness, listening to the peculiar noises of the forest at night, or maybe something worse. We hear knocked-together wood, and we hear hooting somewhere between that of an owl and a loon, those sounds far off and then much closer, the characters moving from amused fear to abject terror, their voices moving from low whispers to so soft they’re practically just mouthing words to each other. In between shrieks.

That couple is played by Bryce Johnson and Alexie Gilmore: he’s a Bigfoot enthusiast shooting a DIY doc in northern California, and she’s his girlfriend, a Sasquatch skeptic there for moral support and to hold the camera. Structurally, the movie borrows Blair Witch‘s template wholesale: the first half of the movie includes interviews with townsfolk about the legend, both believers and skeptics, mixed with the couple’s disagreements, often filmed from the dashboard’s POV. (The two encounter a considerable amount of Sasquatch kitsch, from burger joints to motels, which inspires some legitimately funny banter.) The second half heads into the woods, navigating the trail that Bigfoot-footage pioneers Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin traveled almost 50 years before.

The untamed nature into which they hike is scary enough without a possible Bigfoot afoot—nothing underscore’s humanity’s vulnerability like heading into inescapable territory without weapons. The couple manages to make it through their night of tent terror, that virtuosic scene of sound-designed fear, just to get lost in the woods the next day (again, just like Blair Witch!) and spend another night listening to more nocturnal whooping. That the first night features a failed marriage proposal encourages a reading of the Sasquatch as the predatory manifestation of their clearly doomed-to-fail love, but Bobcat Goldthwait’s unforced direction equally encourages you to sit back and enjoy the surprising tension squeezed out of a few strange sounds.

Opens June 6 at IFC Center

Trust Me
Directed by Clark Gregg

Hearing that an actor has turned director should raise any sophisticated cinephile’s red flags. Just as the skills that make a good reporter rarely make a good editor, or the talents of a line cook don’t necessarily translate into those of a head chef, neither does the great actor’s craft align with the great filmmaker’s. You can’t fault performers for wanting to try: they work watching others exert creative control, and who doesn’t want to be the boss? You just wish producers would be more discerning about whom they hand out money to.

Clark Gregg, though, is different. He’s reached new levels of visibility thanks to the Avengers franchise—from the first Iron Man to the starring role on ABC’s Agents of SHIELD series, not to mention a featured part in Joss Whedon’s inbetweener, Much Ado About Nothing—but Trust Me isn’t his first time behind either the typewriter or the camera: he wrote the screenplay for Robert Zemeckis’s Harrison Ford thriller What Lies Beneath, and he wrote and directed 2008’s Chuck Palahniuk adaptation Choke. (He was also one of the students who with David Mamet and William H. Macy founded the Atlantic Theater, for which he’s directed several plays.) Both movies have rotten ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, but his latest ought to break that streak: it’s as wry, witty, and lovable as its writer-director-star.

Gregg plays a former child star turned agent to actors too young to vote; he knows not just the industry but also the personal toll it takes, making him uniquely adept at the requisite ego management. His Hollywood is a town of the powerful and desperate, everyone mugging with a confidence that can vanish at the nod of an executive’s head, and his is a self-deprecating performance, unafraid of spotlighting the pathetic and undignified demands of show business: the begging, the genuflection, the wretchedness.

Tinseltown emerges as an embodiment of pure capitalism, wherein money and business always trump human relationships—it’s a racket governed by profits over people. Gregg and Saxon Sharbino, playing a promising actress who sticks with him as her agent after they meet randomly at an audition, become the only two people trying to defy that ethos, to do right by each other without getting lost in the cynicism. Before its surprise twist into unhinged melodrama, its third act takes a turn into family drama, the focus on contracts and negotiations fading into background. That’s because, though Trust Me is a sly, subtle and smart Hollywood satire, at root it’s not about business—it works so well because it’s about recognizable, sympathetic people.

Opens June 6

The Sacrament
Directed by Ti West

Indie horror maven Ti West has succeeded by not sticking to any subgenre: he adopts well-worn varieties and reinvigorates them—that is, the setups are familiar, but the execution is exhilarating: his stripped-down reworking of Deliverance, Trigger Man; the grimy, 70s-style occult slasher, The House of the Devil; and the classical/Spielbergian ghost story, The Innkeepers. His latest plays with a more recent trend in scary movies, found footage, with actors playing Vice reporters who visit a hippie commune carved out of remote jungle; the movie is structured like an episode of the media company’s HBO series: explanatory titles fill in gaps in the shakily shot footage, as does direct-camera narration by 21st-century-horror ubiquity AJ Bowen. Journalism is the perfect medium for West to adopt here, as the film’s frights are from the real-world: he eschews Devil’s supernaturalness and Innkeepers’ paranormality, focusing instead on the potential evil of mankind itself.

At first, everything seems pretty nice. “Eden Parish” is like heaven on Earth; sure, it’s a little creepy—and is far more sinister as midnight approaches, with the appearance of terrified dissidents—but for much of the movie it’s an attractive community: put-together, self-sustaining, freed from poverty, racism and violence. West spends the bulk of the film building up the place and its lifestyle so he can tear it down; he’s a master of mounting tension, establishing character and atmosphere before the long-deferred snap. Here, that inevitable break is particularly horrifying, and involves a whole bunch of people drinking the Kool-Aid—you know, literally.

The villain is a conspicuously Jim Jones-like leader, known as Father, played larger-than-life by Gene Jones. (The rest of the cast is a familiar roster of indie hotshots: Joe Swanberg, Kentucker Audley, Amy Seimetz, Kate Lyn Sheil. Even the crew: I don’t think I’ve ever before blurted out “oh, he’s awesome!” after reading the sound designer’s name; it’s director-in-his-own-right
Graham Reznick.) Jones proves a terrifying brand of boogeyman, more pernicious than any monster with a knife: he can kill dozens if not hundreds of people using his words, without ever lifting a weapon. The creepiest thing of all is humanity’s capacity for madness: not the armed psychokillers hidden in shadows but the twisted leaders right out in the open—and those troubled and desperate enough to follow them.

Opens June 6