opinion has it that director 
Nicolas Roeg "lost it" somewhere in the early '80s after his unsurpassed, decade-long run of masterpieces including Don't Look Now, Performance, Walkabout, Bad Timing, and The Man Who Fell to Earth. More accurately, it would seem commercial opportunities changed drastically around that time and made it harder for filmmakers like him to successfully mount their ambitious visions on film, and though his made-for-TV films are indeed pretty anonymous, his later features are still more than worthy of a look. One of the strangest and most haunting films from that later period is Cold Heaven, a fragmented adaptation of Brian Moore's 1983 novel about a woman's crisis of spirit and faith in the face of a supernatural occurrence. The result is a challenging film to say the least, though it's made with Roeg's typically immaculate skill and also holds curiosity value as his one venture into zombie territory, though not in the way you might expect. 
both a skull fracture and brain damage. Later at the hospital he's pronounced dead, which provokes a variety of conflicting emotions Marie 
finds difficult to reconcile. However, that's nothing compared to what happens when Alex's corpse vanishes from the hospital the morning his autopsy is set to begin. Soon after, Alex turns up at the hotel room where the guilt-ridden Marie is forced to come to terms with what she was planning to do to their marriage. As Alex seems to drift back and forth between stages of lifelessness, lapsed Catholic Marie tries to find answers from the church in the form of Father Niles (Patton) and Sister Martha (Shire) while continuing her affair to diminishing returns with Daniel. Soon she comes to realize that a genuinely divine intervention has intruded on her life and made her reassess everything she thought she knew. 
viewing experience thanks to Roeg's endlessly fascinating editing style, the uncomfortable themes swirling around together here, and the truly out-there final 
resolution that drags the film into spiritual territory that proves to be a make or break proposition for many viewers. (It would also make a very interesting, more upbeat companion film to the same year's The Rapture.) Apart from the welcome but very underused Carmen, the cast all does well including a nice turn by Seymour Cassel as the U.S. aide in Mexico; for some reason, actor Lenny von Dohlen (Twin Peaks, Electric Dreams) also turns up here in a significant role as a hotel attendant but isn't credited anywhere in the film or on IMDb. 