Communion 1989

In 1985, New York–based author Whitley Strieber, Christopher Walken, leads a seemingly stable life with his wife Anne, Lindsay Crouse, and their son Andrew Joel Carlson in Manhattan. He enjoys professional success, yet his nights are invaded by paranoid dreams of an unseen presence.

During a weekend at the family cabin in the woods, the intruder alarm sounds and Strieber glimpses a face watching him from the doorway as bright light floods the cabin windows, waking Andrew and their friends Alex Andreas Katsulas and Sarah Terri Hanauer, while Anne remains asleep.

Back in New York, life seems to return to normal, but Strieber finds that his work and personal life are increasingly unsettled by recurring nightmares and visions of strange alien beings—greys, blue doctors, and bugs—that invade his waking hours and strain his marriage, and begin to worry Andrew.

After an incident at the cabin in which Strieber becomes convinced there are alien beings inside the home and even pulls his gun on Anne, he worries about his son’s exposure and agrees to see psychiatrist Dr. Janet Duffy, who specializes in hypnotic regression therapy. Frances Sternhagen plays the doctor, and her sessions hint that Strieber may have been abducted and experimented on, even as he remains skeptical about confirming anything.

He reluctantly attends a group therapy session with others who report similar experiences, trying to separate belief from memory while feeling pulled to confront the truth. Eventually he realizes he must face the visions, not deny them, and returns to the cabin where most of the incidents occur. There, he interacts with the alien beings and comes to understand that this contact has been a lifelong thread—one that was passed down from his father Karl and is now likely to be passed on to Andrew.

Making peace with the extraordinary presence, Strieber chooses to integrate it into his life and from that point on, the boundary between the normal and the otherworldly remains porous. In the final scene, he sits in his office and appears to welcome the face of a ‘grey’ alien, signaling a choice to live with the unknown rather than retreat from it.