Gold is beautiful and it is rare. It is also arbitrary: there are rarer metals (platinum for one), more useful metals, prettier metals, and, indeed, pretty useful and rare things that aren’t made of metal at all. Some of these things even breathe. Seen in a certain light, gold can appear to be little more than a rock. But to see gold in the light, to let its shine hook you— that can drive a man to death.

Jack McCann has spent 15 years alone and looking for gold. The rock drives him as much as his creed:

“I never earned a nicked from another man’s sweat.”

So there is something both admirable and impolite about the guy. Hackman draws out sympathy without requiring it. He fits some American ideal for individualism and, when he finds his gold, he has won where most men lose: he knew what he wanted and he found it. He can die complete now. This is where most films would end. What makes Eureka — and unmakes McCann and Sir Harry Oakes, the real-life figure he’s based on — is that there is still a lot of movie and life to come.

Roeg’s films have never kept strict time. Roeg himself (charmingly disarrayed in this Telegraph interview) darts between what once was, what could be, and something-else-that-once-was-but-not-that-other-thing-oh-wait... If you agree with me that Hollywood films over the past five years have grown repetitive down to their basic rhythms, then you’ll find Bad Timing, Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, and The Man Who Fell to Earth revitalisingly offbeat. When his better films finish, you want to start them again; when you do they will still feel just as novel. If there is a trick there, beyond mining subject matter that is rich in literature but bafflingly less so in film —real sex, grief, envy, alienation— it might be Roeg’s complete command of images and a faith in their power to kill boredom (and survive even a thousand jump cuts).

Eureka is no different. When Jack finds his gold we jump twenty years forwards in time, from ice to the Bahamas, from one kind of film into another. (This shift might not entirely work, but that the film feels free enough to allow it does.) When the audience figures things out we find that we are in the mysterious future that the backcountry madam foresaw and warned Jack about. And in this future the man has an island, a daughter, and is comfortable in a dress flecked in parrot shit. This is a vision of Jack’s peace and it is being ruined by the people who want a piece of Jack and who can’t share his creed.

It’s difficult to see where the film stands on its various characters. Jack’s knows himself and only needs himself, but is this enlightened? (Or do we just side with Hackman because of his performance?) We have Meyer Lansky who thinks of himself as a man of God; we have another mobster who is muscle but thinks of himself as a lawyer; we have a Counts who thinks of himself as a seeker or mystic but bans himself from introspection. Of all the ways to make a fortune, finding it in the ground leaves a man least beholden to others and even the purity of that is open to debate. Allowing these men to take the centre of the film at times makes it both messier and so much more interesting to remember.

The film is at its most bright when working as a biopic, but even then it frees itself of its subject for his daughter, or maybe even his son-in-law, or maybe just his property. All of this doesn’t work, but enough does to make you believe that the film knows what it wants even if what that is seems mysterious, possibly because it’s not as neat and singular as mining. Where it really falters is when it moves into courtroom drama because it limps into it owing to a major plot point and it doesn’t quite survive the ice bath of that genre’s speechifying and claustrophobia.

This last paragraph contains a spoiler that shouldn’t be too surprising if you know Harry Oakes’ story, but which I’d like to prevent you from discovering if you do not. Eyes away now. In a way, death should never be thought of as a spoiler and yet most everyone frees himself from the thought of it. The film argues that Jack/Harry died when he found his gold, that he was a man in search of gold and the discovery ended both the search and that man. So it’s tough to see Jack in the Bahamas as anything other than a shadow. When he finally releases his hold on things he, well, (a) very surprisingly and sweetly takes his wife to bed as a final gift to her and against time, and (b) convinces the mobsters to put himself to sleep. There is something generous here. And, even in the end — which happens 2/3rds of the way through the film — our understanding of Jack McCann has to make room for more ideas.