The Rainbow Experiment

This movie could have been great, but it was chaos to watch. The overlapping talking, the split screens, the random conversations. It's like they tried to cram a bunch on characters/plots into one movie. Every adult seemed scared of themselves and neurotic.

The Rainbow Experiment is a gritty, unsettling dramatic film that will have your eyes glued to the screen from beginning to end. I highly reccomend this film.

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.

There are a lot of plots to follow. Maybe too many. But I enjoyed the gritty hand-held shots and plot twists.