Beyond the Black Rainbow

I went into this with no expectation whatsoever, so the first 40-50 minutes were amazing and original with bags of style conjuring an eager anticipation for what lay ahead for what appeared to be a low budgeter Sci-Fi/thriller that could definitely compete. However, the style soon became monotonous and predictable, ultimately undoing everything that had come before with its lack of progression. Editing was also exceptionally poor, where long drawn out episodes that worked so well in, say, the original version of "Solaris" or "2001", overstepped its original boldness by becoming irritating in the tiresome second half. But what appeared to be original and innovative was to become it's worst enemy - with so many options made available in the first half - the second half was a miserable let down. Any notion of this being a cerebral thriller utterly forsaken for....well....not a lot at the end of the day....with a its only goal to meet its mildly intriguing final shot.

I so want to recommend this for its brave and fresh (if derivative) approach, but - as a movie in its complete format - it was a very poor.

Its a well done enough horror/suspense/David Cronenberg esque wtf kind of film--but after a while i kind of just wanted them to cut to the chase already. by which i mean there's a lot of set up and a lot of artfully done goosing of that set up--but it takes a good hour and a half if not longer before the actual ch as/confrontation between the two main characters that you spend most of the film waiting to happen finally happens. Don't get me wrong--this movie is trying and succeeds to a varying degree at capturing a certain style and certain flavor of suspense horror film---the director is quite clearly a fan of early Cronenberg--there's not just the obvious nod to Scanners but there's nods to The Brood and Shivers and even a slight one to videodrome in here as well (at least i thought i caught those maybe i'm wrong i don't know) and there are nods to other scare films of the early 80's as well--and certainly the whole tone and pace and set design and wardrobe and just everything about it is very much on the money for a suspense film from the early part of that decade--but i don't know, the movie also had a sort of sleepy effect on me---like as psychedelic as the director wants the movie to be (and it definitely is) you can only indulge in that kind of style so much before you just end up putting a guy like me into a kind of coma--and not the cool trance like one that i'm sure the director was hoping his film would have on its audience. You know there's only so much ranting and raving i could take from the good psychotic doctor and there's only so much self defense scenes i could take from the woman in the mental hospital before a part of me just wanted to scream Get on with it already movie! but eventually the movie does--and it does it well enough---but not so well enough that i can't help but think this movie should have probably been at least a half hour shorter then it was. Ehh whatever---i'm positive it will find its audience soon enough anyways and it will have a nice cult like following in the years to come--much like Cronenberg's early stuff does too.

If you enjoyed Tarkovsky's Solaris, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey or Godard's Alphaville then this might be up your alley. It's a slow paced surreal sci fi film, with warbling, droning synth music, 80's film colouring and the occasional blurred visuals as if you are sedated. Which if fitting as it tells the story of a powerful young girl being held captive and under sedation by a mysterious and futuristic cult, that seems to be conducting some kind of scientific experimentation. Very little really happens in most of the film, just striking visuals, long stares, pulsing lights (matched by a pulsing synth soundtrack), and slow shots of the kind of things that people thought to be futuristic back in the 80's. If you like the sound of any of this then check it out, if not then definitely give it a miss and save yourself the time.

It's the cold, shiny time of 1983. In what looks like a sci-fi future vision via the Kubrickian '60s a utopia is created to try to grant happiness to the masses via a complex regime of meditation, nature, and pharmacology--and absolute isolation in the sterile confines of building that somewhat resembles a fluorescent spaceship crash-landed within the sparse flora of a desolate earth. This utopia has been tainted by evil, and our savior is a near mute, beguiling beauty that must break through harm's way in order to regain some normalcy to her life, a life born to such a world and never matured entirely, and if this task is not achieved could possibly alter the future for us all. This is the topsy-turvy, slowly moving, marvelously rendered, and absolutely bewildering world of Beyond the Black Rainbow. This film, written and directed by Panos Cosmatos (whose daddy made several he-man action films in the actual '80s), turns lo-fi film grain, stark sets, odd camera angles, and eternal pauses in dialogue and action into a strange mosaic that is more of a compilation of what came to define hard science fiction films from the late 1960s to mid 1980s. The film begins like a post-script to "2001", or an early David Cronenberg film mutates into what resembles the "Rising" shorts of Kenneth Anger, and finally settles into the paranoia of Lucas' "THX 1138" mixed again with the mutations of the body that so intrigued Cronenberg's early efforts. This film for a small subset of film buffs, and in conception and tone most resembles the genre shot comp that was 2009's "Amer". Where that film aped sequences from Italian giallos, this seems to be doing the same for American and Russian science movies. This film feels like an experiment, or more to the point an exercise, but it is a worthwhile, rewarding viewing for their trouble in taking the trippy voyage laid out before them. I recommend it to viewers with patience and acceptance of story lines that are mostly devoid of linear narratives (you know who you are). -CP 8/10

OK so for convenience, I'll just break it down to the kind of people who will like this movie, vs. those who won't. You pick your category and then you will know if you should see it. Because 1 out of 20 people will love this, and the rest will think it is the worst movie ever.

You will love it if: 1: You felt 2001 could have been even slower paced and still be awesome 2: You love really thinky sci-fi even if it doesn't involve people shooting aliens 3: You are crazy in love with 80's hair styles and weird synth music (this movie takes place in 1983, and takes that responsibility VERY seriously) 4: You loved Agent Smith's delivery of lines in The Matrix, and would have liked it if he talked even more slowly and threateningly 5: You think the only good sci-fi is 70's Russian sci-fi

You will hate this movie if: 1: You enjoy having more than one person deliver lines over the course of two hours (basically one speaking part in this movie, though the actor does a good job) 2: You don't like when movies are very, very pretentious 3: You like your movies to generally make an effort to make sense (at one point I swear the main guy gets a phone call from Speak-n-Spell) 4: You don't like when movies spend a considerable amount of their running time trying to injure the viewer's senses 5: You like a really good ending (if you look over the reviews, whether people loved or hated this movie everyone agrees the ending was weak)

All things considered, I really liked this movie, and so did the people I saw it with. But that's a bunch of film geeks. If you're a weird film geek too, I recommend it.