K-PAX



USA, 2001, 120 min, color

After a mugging incident at New York's Grand Central Station, Prot, a man who claims to be an alien from the planet K-PAX, is turned over to a public mental hospital and the care of Dr. Mark Powell. When medication fails to alter Prot's insistence that he is visiting from another world on a fact-finding mission, Powell gets more involved with his patient, who seems to have a calming effect on the other residents of his ward. At first convinced that Prot is a delusional who can be treated, Powell begins to wonder if his bizarre patient's story is true, particularly after a group of astronomers find that Prot possesses the baffling ability to see ultraviolet light. As the date grows nearer when Prot claims he must leave Earth (a "class BA-III planet"), Powell becomes increasingly concerned that a psychiatric breakthrough must occur by then.

"K-PAX is a mystical, twistical psychological drama in the ''One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'' tradition of romanticizing the miraculous, charismatic, saintly insane."