"Beyond the Black Rainbow" Movie Review

     Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010), Directed by Panos Cosmatos, starring Eva Allen and Michael Rogers. Set in 1983, A lovely  girl with ESP,  Llana is held captive in a psychedelic underground drug manufacturing institute called Arboria. Run by Mercurio Arboria and the hypnotically evil Doctor Barry Nyle. Barry Nyle played very well by Michael Rogers interrogates her throughout the beginning of the film about her symptoms of the drugs she has been injected with and her psyche. He is probably one of the creepiest characters you will see onscreen, with his blue piercing eyes, cold stare, and slow hypnotic voice. In the film the Llana character has no dialogue which gives her character a charming yet brooding mystique, her emotions being conveyed only through her engaging eyes onscreen from time to time. Her goal is to escape from the facility without being sedated, or in a few cases killed. As the film draws on it further explains why she is held captive there and there is a really great scene which is told from Nyle's perspective of a trippy flashback he had in the 1960s involving him taking LSD that explains who the characters really are. The film itself artistically presents a lot of symbolism that we find in today's society. So if your the type of person who gets impatient with art house movies and likes to see explosions every five seconds, you probably won't understand this film. Although this film is VERY visually stylized it does have a very interesting plot that will leave you thinking for days to come.

   The role that cinematography plays in the movie is very great and the most daring than any movie I have seen this year. It is said by the cinematographer Norm Li of the film that it was filmed with a 35mm panavision camera which I find very raw and loyal to the earlier genre that the film portrays. This film presents imagery that is very reminiscent of 2001: A Space Odyssey, THX 1138, A Clockwork Orange, The man who fell to Earth, and many other films of the 70s and 80s. This film is the kind that will be still talked about 20 years from now and will most likely get a cult following. Grade: A.