Cabinet of Curiosities

Sheriff Nate Craven (Glynn Turman) brings in his old friend and pathologist, Dr. Carl Winters (F. Murray Abraham), for the post-mortem examination of the dead ...

He says that the ball was his ship, and he destroyed it to preserve his anonymity and the mystery surrounding his species. The last few minutes are just the two of them playing a game of wits, and everything from the dialogue mixing to the choice of shots is dialed up to eleven to make us focus on what these two guys are saying. Carl assures him that he’s going to die in his body and that the fact that he and his kind exist won’t be a mystery anymore. When Carl realizes that Allen is going to cut himself open to make it look like an autopsy and then transfer his alien form into his body, he begins to stall until Nate arrives. Allen even says that he can “smell” Carl’s cancer and lets him know that he’s going to inhabit his body next and “love” it. That’s when the hair on the back of his neck stands up, and he hears his conscience telling him to leave the mortuary and run away. However, when he does go to the refrigerator unit to take out Allen, he gets the shock of a lifetime. I’ll even go as far as to say that “The Autopsy” is a great companion piece to Prior’s “The Empty Man” (which is a film you should definitely watch if you haven’t already). After reaching the makeshift mortuary, he tells Nate to rest up and meet him in the morning. The Sheriff first talks about finding a dead body in the woods that was butchered in a way that only a surgeon could. What he finds over the course of a few hours makes him (and us) question everything he knows about the known universe. And it is a life-long wish of mine to be alive at the time when we make (or someone else makes) first contact.