Beyond the Black Rainbow

I heard about this title mid 2011 and has been near the top of my list ever since, not sure what the delay was in distribution but it's been quite a wait, which fuelled my desire to see this film. The instant I saw the trailer I was certain this was my kind of film, vague dialogue hinting a hidden depths, long drawn out scenes with sinister undertones and beautifully crafted futurism styled sets (maybe a little to Kubrick-esk) but still great looking. Everything was in place for a successful romp around a mercurial world spawned and brought to life in nightmarish vision by Panos Cosmatos. But, for all it's promise and as much as I really wanted to love this film it did fall a little flat. The set design is beautifully crafted, and the high photography levels of some of the scenes is something to be admired, but on occasion a little arbitrary as some scenes did not drive character or narrative forwards nor did it express or emphasis emotions. The narrative is overly grand which I like (keep it simple) and is deliberately slow and off-paced, which will definitely separate the film lovers from the average watcher that may have stumbled across this film, as you will need to invest a little concentration. There was a downfall to the film as mysterious and menacing atmosphere that it postured at the start did dissipate throughout the film. This is a first attempt by a director who clearly has a cinematic eye with a good understanding of film taking inspiration from some great directors. Unfortunately he didn't quite create the level of intrigue found in a Kubrick film or a deliver the ruptured reality of a Lynch film and missed the overall depth of a Tarkovskiy film, but it wasn't without it's own moments. Definitely worth your time - A steady start from a new director but it's worth remembering art house isn't an exact science, hopefully he will get the chance to produce more in the future.

It is a really annoying, boring and slow movie!!!!! If I was one of the actors in the movie I would be ashamed! Maybe it will be good for narcoleptic people to watch this, so they can fall asleep with no problem. A lot of part of this movie is just meaningless, and has no point. All of the silly slow motion parts of the movie just wasted my time. This is just a bad movie. Some movies are bad but fun. This is not one of them. This one is just BAD. I'd rather watch paint dry. I'd rather watch a kettle boil. I have to remember this directors name, so I can avoid all of his movies for the rest of my life because I wouldn't forgive myself if I waste more of my time on his movies. OMG!

This is probably the worst movie I've ever seen. Definitely the worst movie I've seen this year. The movie moves slowly. Now, when I say slowly I don't mean slowly as in movies that take their time to explore characters. Oh no, not at all. Instead it feels like the director found the slow motion button and fell in love with it. Even worse is that it's not even slow motion, it's just that the people as well as the camera is moving so slow that it makes the skin on my body crawl. Fact of the matter is that when you watch certain scenes and fast forward the movie still plays like in slow motion! I decided to take a chance on this movie based on some reviews here on IMDb, which compared the movie to movies from Cronenberg, Kubrick and Tarkovskij. 3 great directors with a style of their own. This movie has NOTHING in comparison with those three directors. Oh, they used a VCR tape with huge letters in this movie? That has to mean that it's Cronenberg-esque! Oh please! That's like comparing me to Usain Bolt. Hey, I've ran 100m at times in my life so that must mean that I'm in the same category with Bolt right? No. The answer is no. I am not nearly on the same level as Bolt just like this movie is no way near the level of Tarkovskij, Kubrick or Cronenberg. There is no redeeming quality in the movie. I wish the acting was good, but it's not. I wish the direction was good, but it's god awful. I wish the music would enhance the movie, but it's stuck in bad 80's SF retro mode. I wish I'd never seen this movie...

wow this movie sucked. There is nothing good to say about this movie. There were times when you could fast forward the movie and it would still look slow, this is not an exaggeration. Nothing happens for the longest time and your patience never pays off. I was hoping for something trippy, the whole time i felt like there was potential for trippyness but it never delivers. There were a few moments where the movie really looked like it might fo somewhere or there was characters that was almost interesting but the movie is so dull that those moments are not worth mentioning in fear that i might make someone think there is something redeemable about this movie. Everyone do yourself a favor and skip this one!

For starters, around 97 % of this movie was filmed out of focus, I did the math, because I had nothing ells to do during this very long and very boring movie. The soundtrack was basically the amplified sound of a low- power light bulb and a Tesla coil alternately, and the movie made no attempt at making any sense. At all. I see that some reviewers consider each frame to be a work of art. This might be true, but then it is the longest 103 minutes of unrelated, sensory-mocking works of art that I have ever experienced. I think, generally, that if you want to make a movie, you should think of a story you would like to tell. It might have a beginning and an ending, maybe even something going on in the middle. This movie did not have that, nothing happened in the first 4/5 of the film and only in the very last minutes did the advertised plot take place. When I say that nothing happened, it is to be considered a very serious statement. The first scenes of "once upon a time in the west" with the noisy windmill has about 25.000 times more action than the first 90 minutes of this movie. The next thing a movie-maker might consider doing, is placing a number of characters in his/her movie. A character could be described as a consistent (no luck there) personality with reasons, motivations or justifications for his/her actions (Don't even get me started on how that is not a part of this movie). You might also consider giving you characters some lines to bring out their personality to the viewer (honestly, almost any lines but these would have done well) and maybe engage the different characters in meaningful(well, they don't really have to be that meaningful) conversations to bring forward the plot or clear up the characters motives(nope, none of that ether). At the end of the day, filming an out of focus quiet girl with no facial expression in a room with a strange red light to the soundtrack of a broken light bulb for an obscene amount of time, simply cannot(in my book) be considered making a movie. Im sorry guys, but I have to call Worst movie ever.

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.

After about the first 20-30 minutes, I found it incredibly boring and pointless. I think there's a bad guy who speaks a lot but it's not terribly interesting what he has to say and there's a female protagonist who doesn't say or do much of anything in the first 20-30 minutes that I watched it. Frankly, I'm watching the bad guy delivering his monologues and I'm having trouble following the point of what's he trying to say. Or maybe I was too bored and disinterested to follow what he was saying.. Then, I started fast forwarding it and there's about 15-30 minutes in the second half where it shows the female protagonist escaping from where she was being held captive. This whole 15-30 minute period could have, and should have been, edited down to about a minute. If it had been visually thrilling/edifying in some way, that would have been a reason to make it longer than a few minutes. But it wasn't. As far as I can tell, this movie was total garbage. I can't figure out how it got any good reviews. The only thing I can think of is that there are some foolish people out there who think that if there's something that doesn't make sense, it must be beyond their understanding and therefore, a form of art. But sometimes, as in this particular case, garbage is just garbage.

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.

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