Eraserhead

Henry Spencer lives alone in a bleak industrial city of soot and machinery. He visits his girlfriend Mary X for dinner at her family's unsettling home — a meal notable for small roasted chickens that bleed and writhe when carved — and learns that Mary has given birth to their child: a premature, deformed creature swaddled in bandages, more wound than infant, that cries without ceasing.

Mary moves in, but the baby's constant wailing wears her down and she abandons Henry, leaving him as sole caretaker. His nights are consumed by hallucinations: a beautiful woman who lives inside his radiator, dancing on fleshy pods as she sings about heaven; a disfigured man on a distant planet who pulls levers. These visions do not explain anything. They accumulate.

Henry has a brief encounter with the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall that ends in its own surreal grotesquerie. His dread about the baby — about the body, about parenthood, about whatever his life has become — metastasizes into action. He cuts open the infant's bandages. The film shifts into pure image: Henry's own head falling from his body, being carried away, made into pencil erasers by the man in the planet. He reaches the Lady in the Radiator. She embraces him. The screen floods with light.