Beyond the Black Rainbow

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.

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.

Drawing influence from Argento, Kubrick, Cronenberg, early George Lucas, very early Carpenter, and even Mirhage at one point, Panos Cosmatos' debut film strangely manages to exist in a category all its own. It tries to do much with its themes, as well, addressing the Boomer generation's uprising of New Age alternative medicine (or just "not medicine" as learned men may call it) and how it may have evolved into dark experimentation in the 1980's. This might have been the movie that started the 80's nostalgia craze of this past decade, made more mainstream by works like Drive and Stranger Things (and also vaporwave).

Like Cosmatos' heavily stylized Mandy - which is a unique sight to behold in spite of its callbacks to grindhouse horror, Heavy Metal, et al - 2010's Beyond the Black Rainbow mixes several old-school visions to create a journey into the unknown that (in spite of it all but very fittingly) is unlike anything I've seen with my mortal eyes. It does have more style than substance, unfortunately, and one can get bored by it. Still, it may put you in too much of a trance for you to switch it off.

Most fascinating among the main characters is Dr. Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers), who runs the Arboria Institute, described as "a New Age research facility dedicated to finding a reconciliation between science and spirituality", in 1983, now conducting experiments to unlock the psychic abilities of young captive Elena (Eva Allan). The elderly Dr. Arboria, who founded the institute, is also being kept at the facility, alongside several once-human lifeforms.

Nyle is also not quite the person he once was. We learn that he was Arboria's star pupil and that the final stage of his training, where he was intended to achieve transcendence, unleashed something evil. Michael Rogers plays him in a way where you can believe that a man this broken could exist. As with the recent Joker, we follow Nyle on a journey where he becomes "himself" and finally smiles.

Again, there is much to recognize here. The camera work will undoubtedly bring Kubrick to mind, certain body horror elements are out of Cronenberg's playbook, the colored lighting of certain scenes are very Argento, one sequence resembles THX, another resembles Begotten, and there is one set in particular that would be at home in Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain.

I also mentioned Carpenter earlier, and his influences are also present in Sinoia Caves' soundtrack, which is currently one of my absolute favorites in cinema (it is certainly my most played album on Spotify this year). I read that Tangerine Dream and the music from The Shining were also part of the "blueprints".

I get to wondering: why was I more bothered by the blatant influences in, say, The Neon Demon from 2016? Nicolas Winding Refn, its director, likes to reference many of the same auteurs and eras as Cosmatos, yet I find that Cosmatos has managed to create his own universe of strangeness altogether, whereas Neon Demon seemed more like it was aping other films. I'm not sure why. Maybe because The Neon Demon tried to have interesting characters on some level, and then didn't deliver.

Beyond the Black Rainbow, meanwhile, is very unabashedly not about that. Its aim is to take you beyond the borders of our reality (even if this surreal alternate '86 still has commentary to offer), whether you meet any realistic people on the other side or not. The movie does have a few hollow moments because of it (it wouldn't have hurt if we knew a bit more about Elena before she broke, or if she was more of an audience surrogate), but I have faith that Cosmatos will one day so completely transport me that I don't care if I even see a human face the entire film.

7 is my current rating. I intend to see the film again; I feel like this is one of those movies where the atmosphere and the viewer's state of mind will determine if it is a "meh" or a 10/10. It is nonetheless a deeply fascinating movie that, in spite of my above statements, I can't fully compare to much of anything:

This movie was written by directed by Panos Cosmatos, creator of Mandy, which I love. Similarly to Mandy, the dialogue was slow and surreal, but this movie just wasn't as engaging and special as Mandy. I cannot ignore the absolutely beautiful visuals and cinematography, but at the same time they were really the only thing that kept me invested in the movie. The movie was basically plotless and it was just so damn slow, it almost felt like a chore to watch. It's really not a bad movie, the only things wrong with this movie are the (very) slow pacing, and the lack of plot. Still maybe worth a watch, but you don't have to give your full attention.