Technology is a recurring thread in all Reggio’s previous films, and never examined more closely than in Visitors. The vivid, reverie-like composition of faces, seemingly responding to inanimate, off-screen distractions, fused with Glass’s unyielding score, weaves a peculiar sense of doom throughout.

It perhaps comes as no surprise, considering his backstory, that Reggio is vehemently skeptical about the omnipotence of technology. “I have an old person’s big number phone – I don’t use email. I’ve seen how it can become like another part of your body, it becomes inescapable –it’s in your nervous system. I think it’s the most misunderstood subject on the planet. We keep saying its the use we make of things that determines its value, that its neutral, it could be good or bad; its good in medicine, good in education, bad in war. I think that’s a lot of hogwash – the world we live in has been recreated through the image and likeness of technology – it is remaking the world in which we live. We don’t use it, we live it, its as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.”

Reggio suggests that we, like all animals, simply become the environment that we live in. “If our environment is technology, not the gadgets and all that stuff, but the whole organization of life as a technological environment –– our souls are being touched, and in that sense all of us are like that old man mumbling on the street – its in the air – we all become cyborgs.”

Visitors opens this week at the Landmark Sunshine Cinema.