The Rainbow Experiment

There's a lot goin' on in the time-shifting mystery drama "The Rainbow Experiment". Too damn much, actually.

Not to imply that Writer/Director Christina Kallas isn't abundantly ambitious in presenting this tragic tale set in a New York City High School. But there are far too many ill-defined characters involved in a surfeit of underdeveloped or out and out inexplicable predicaments to make it wholly palatable.

Still kudos go to veteran actresses Laura Pruden as a no-b.s. police investigator with a soul and Francis Benhamou, a school counselor who believes she can rescue kids who sadly may have long since passed the point of saving.

This could have been great if they had stuck to the actual storyline. Instead it became very convoluted and confusing, the timeline was all over the place. I just wanted to follow the kids and what happened to them. I don't really know how it ended, too.

When things happens to a pupil/student at school, all hell is loose, in fact on everybody and from everybody. then add all the outside investigative sources coming in, the union laywers, the shamans, and of course the pta and the parents themselves. its hard on hard on delivering guilt, but the unique thing in this film is that the victim himself follows the action at all levels as a ghost/spirit, and gives some informational hints to what happened, or what seemed to happen or what was actually really happening.

to make a film like this, youll need order, and this film does not have that order at all. its like flashing from room to room, meeting to meeting, conversation to conversation at a breathless pace. the filmography are not the best and the camera is moving nonstop,so you have no chance to fix your eyes at a subject, its a trick to divert you away from the truth, but that alon with the use of 2 split, 3split,4split and 6 split screens, makes you even more bewildered on what the director wants to tell. the sound quality are bad at times, and the quality is next to seeing the mic hanging down between the actors..

though its an interesting issue and topic, the makers of this film has not given a prescribed way of telling a straight story, and the grumpy old man who loved to see magnesium flare up in the classroom when student, barely recommends this one.

The Rainbow Experiment is an unsettling movie. One can imagine oneself as any of the different characters as the disaster in a school unfolds: the volatile teenagers, the angry and grieving parents, the professionals and staff locked in mutual combat. We experience the friction of nonsense and truth, secrecy and revelation, uncanny wisdom and stunning stupidity that we all are capable of. The multiple characters' backstories are confusing and sometimes excessive, but they add to the real-life feel of the film. The jumpy urban cinematography, split screen, and sudden scene shifts enhance the sense of everything happening at once. Random encounters between people build to an emotional climax....that may or may not be real. It's for you to decide.

"The Rainbow Experiment" is a deeply dimensional and immersive schoolhouse drama in which a chemistry class experiment goes horribly awry, leaving a student in a coma.

Students and adult leadership wallow in the aftermath as we learn the backstories of each through some wonderfully unconventional and clever storytelling constructs, including tour guide narration from the lingering spirit of the comatose teen - played by Connor Siemer - who breaks the fourth wall to introduce us to the players in this ensemble cast. Throughout, our suspicions of humanity are largely confirmed: When tragedy strikes near and around us, it's not the empathetic lens of the stricken we see through, but instead we're immersed in our own absorptions relative to the event.

This is a highly ambitious film in the layering of its dramatic and suspenseful story. In a day and age in which major studios admittedly streamline film plots with the presumption their distracted home viewing audiences will be simultaneously navigating their phones, "The Rainbow Experiment" demands that you put your handheld devices down for two hours, and promises a richly nuanced payout in return.