"Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's 13th feature film tells the story of a British reporter who get's stuck in the dunes on his way through North-Africas heated desert and orients himself to a small town. At this secluded place the reporter called David Locke checks in at a small hotel to settle and determine what to do. In the hotel room he notice that the door leading to the room beside is open and slowly enters. Here he finds a deceased man laying fully dressed on a bed. In this decisive moment life passes before the reporters inner eye and he realizes that he is saddened by his own existence.

In a distinctive way Michelangelo Antonioni (1912-2007) has created a film which in it's first half plays out like a thriller and totally changes track in the second half, where the terms fiction and reality are dissected with an intellectuality that sends the viewer into a no man's land between fiction and reality. Even though Michelangelo Antonioni uses a minimum of cinematic effects, he still manages to conceive a fictitious world in a very intelligent way. The photography from Luciano Tovoli and the editing by Michelangelo Antonioni and Franco Arcalli is fine, Michelangelo Antonioni, Mark Peploe and Peter Wollen's screenplay is engaging and Jack Nicholson displays his energetic art of acting."