Eureka

Eureka is considered by many to be Nicolas Roeg's masterpiece. Yet the film was never even released in Belgium. The most infamous film maudit of his career, it's Roeg's idiosyncratic variation on Citizen Kane (1941)—even the protagonist's name, McCann, nods to Orson Welles' classic. Gene Hackman plays a gold prospector who strikes it rich in 1925, fulfilling his life's dream, only to spend the rest of his days on a Caribbean island in a state of spiritual death. Theresa Russell stars as his daughter Tracy—at once his mirror image, his greatest obsession, and his fatal flaw. Thanks in part to Hackman's performance, McCann's brief euphoria and slow unraveling are give a near-Shakespearean weight. With his fragmented and non-linear, mosaic-style editing, Roeg abandons all pretenses of realism. In doing so, he goes deep into the labyrinth of the human psyche and the cosmic resonance that clings to even the mot mundane tragedies.