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.

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

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.

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:

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.