Liquid Sky: Aliens and Alienation

With the recent passing of director Slava Tsukerman, I think it’s time to revisit his 1982 cult film, Liquid Sky. It is a strange, neon-soaked phantasmagoria set in the rougher New York of the 1980s, before money and gentrification smoothed off so much of its edge. Liquid Sky is a story of aliens and dance clubs, sex, drugs, and electronica, performance art, blunt sexual politics, and fluid sexuality. It is more cohesive, and more engaging, than it has any right to be.

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The story revolves around Margaret, a model and struggling actress who spends most of her time clubbing and doing drugs. Keeping her company are her partner, the musician and drug dealer Adrian, and Margaret’s abusive, cocaine-addicted male doppelganger, Jimmy. A parade of other characters come and go on their own trajectories, intersecting with Margaret’s increasingly dangerous life. 

When a tiny spaceship lands on the roof of Margaret’s apartment building, the unseen aliens find a steady supply of drug- and orgasm-induced euphoria to feed on. The people Margaret has sex with begin dying, and a UFO researcher begins closing in.

As if that weren’t enough, the film also manages to work in an off-kilter, sex comedy subplot as a sitcom-like counterweight to the surreal storyline. And, because it can, the film includes some heavy-handed social commentary about socioeconomic status and gender roles. 

Of all the bizarre happenings, that is the only thing that felt disconnected to me.

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Liquid Sky is a visual feast of light, color, and costume set against the New York skyline, highly stylized, with almost ritualistic action and purposefully stilted acting. And yet it manages to produce a relatable emotional center.

Margaret and Jimmy are both played by Anne Carlisle in an aggressively conflicted dual role, creating a delicate balance between the characters’ vulnerabilities and their rage. Adrian’s instability and longing for something better are played with wild intensity by Paula E. Shepperd. Even in unreal circumstances, Carlisle and Shepperd are unexpectedly convincing in expressing their characters’ complicated, unsatisfying relationships and unmoored lives.

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Despite a limited budget, a fundamentally silly script, and bare-bones special effects, Liquid Sky remains a classic of cult cinema, and a reminder of how wonderfully weird the eighties could be. It’s well worth the watch.