Beyond the Black Rainbow: a Disturbing Masterpiece

I recently came across Panos Cosmatos' debut film Beyond the Black Rainbow because I have an affinity for weird sci-fi, surrealistic, and/or bizarre fantasy films, and this one made the list.

Boy was I blown away. The plot is deceptively simple: in the 1960s, an ambitious and idealistic Dr. Mercurio Arboria founded the Arboria institute, with the goal in mind of achieving a better tomorrow with it's participants finding a way towards "perfect happiness". His pitch for this idea is played at the beginning of the movie, and Dr. Arboria appears to be a well-intentioned and intelligent man, but already we can tell by Cosmatos' lighting and the moody retro-synth music (more on that in a moment) that not everything is destined to go well with this idea.

Then we fast forward to 1983--one year before, well, you know--and we follow Dr. Barry Nyle as he carries out a series of weird and creepy interviews with a young woman known as Elena, who appears to have psychic abilities, but is kept in a near-constant stuporous state with an array of vaguely defined mechanisms of the institute. What happened to Dr. Arboria? What about his glorious vision for the future? Did something go wrong, and if so, what?

Right away we begin to sympathize with Elena, who has been in this weird and mysterious institute apparently for her entire life, because she is pitted against the intimidating Dr. Nyle, who seems to now be in charge of the Arboria institute.

To go beyond this initial setup, however, would be to do you an injustice. Movies like this are best entered with as little foreknowledge as possible, so as not to ruin the sense of wonder and mystery that movies like this can do. This movie is not for everyone. It's slow and contemplative, and absolutely drenched in atmosphere, mood, and long shots deliberately composed to draw you into an almost hypnotic state of immersion. Then, it gets REALLY weird. The visual style might best be described as: imagine David Lynch crash landed on Solaris. That is, you have the long, mesmerizing imagery of a Kubrick or Tarkovsky, coupled with haunting and often unexplained nightmarish images. And I love it for that. Couple this with a soundtrack, color palette, and lens choices that deliberately evoke 1980s sci-fantasy, with music that sounds like it could have been composed by Tangerine Dream if they were lost in a John Carpenter movie.

But what is this movie really about? If you haven't seen it yet, I'm about to get into some spoilers, and trust me, if you are not turned off by the movie as I've described it, then you might just be the kind of person who would really like this disturbing acid-trip of a film. You don't want to go into it having been spoiled.

Still with me? Ok, so one of the reasons this movie really got to me was because of the setting and the historical issues it was obviously dealing with. Cosmatos could have set his movie in the far future, and it would have been interesting, but then it would not have really been connected to anything emotionally or historically real. So why did he set his movie in the 1960s and then 1980s? Because he is commenting on the weird history of the last century, much of which I saw first hand, because I was only a little bit younger than Elena at that time. My parent's generation were the hippies who wanted to "tune in, turn on, and drop out" and create free love communes and change the world with peace, harmony, and happiness. I heard people talking about wanting to create a world like that of Mercurio Arboria (a symbolically rich name if there ever was one). But then what happened?

Or should I say: WTF happened? Because in just 15 years, all of that stuff was tossed aside and we wound up with the ultra-materialistic, "greed is right" 1980s, complete with paranoid Reaganomics and a reactionary culture shift toward control, shame, repression, and might-makes-right morality. But Cosmatos is not content to simply demonize this movement, as he is sharp enough to connect the dots here in this movie, to say something deeply profound. Dr. Nyle represents the radical change that happened to the hippie-boomers, and Elena represents the Gen-X children that suffered the consequences. On a very deeply and personal level, I GOT this film, because in a way I lived this, even if not at the level of torment and horror that the movie depicts. My parents "dropped out" and I lived in a commune for a while, until suddenly I didn't and all the sudden my elders were all about the almighty buck, chasing Amway dreams and worshipping the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous". WTF man...so quickly in, I was on Elena's side, as a promising youth, damaged by the ill-fated overweening ideals of her predecessors.

But Cosmatos actually depicts this not so much as a slasher but a tragedy for Nyle. Nyle is the truly interesting character here. He is a horrible human being, but he is not a straightforward villain. He was victimized, in a way, almost as much as Elena. In the midpoint we see how: we follow the devastating and utterly haunting journey Nyle went down in the name of peace and love and harmony, into a phantasmagoric hellscape full of highly disturbing and baffling images. This long, wordless sequence tells us the story in pure images, forcing us to go on the terrifying transformation, as if to say, the sin committed by Arboria and his colleagues was that of trying to arrogate the very power of the gods, and for it, they saw only what lies beyond "the Black Rainbow"--an abyss of pure horror.

This transformed Nyle into a monster, barely concealed in the first act, and performed brilliantly by Michael Rogers. You can see early on (even if you don't know why) that he is only barely able to conceal all that is left of him: pure, primitive id. Dark, unalloyed aggression and predatory desire, until in the final act, triggered by Arboria's death, he takes off his masks, and starts to act on his urges just as Elena evades a number of terrifying obstacles, many of them completely unexplained. And so she does, only to escape the institute, into...a 90s suburb.

So did she really escape? Is the nightmare actually over? Or have we simply gone from one prison to another?

This movie will keep me thinking about it for a long time, and I love such movies. Is it for everyone? Absolutely not. But some filmgoers--you know who you are--who haven't partaken of this eerie fever-dream will really love it, and they will find the themes and images of it staying in their heads for quite a long time after. For me, it gets 5 Dreamstones out of 5.

EG