Beyond the Black Rainbow

[SNIKT1950]

So, I found this movie by mistake eight years ago while I went out to see Nick Refn's Bronson - which was only playing one weekend here at the Beach, and as I walked into the theater this ominous trailer was coming to an end. All I caught were the last few sinister frames and the title card and credits. I left the theater happy with Bronson but truthfully I was more intrigued by the ten seconds of that trailer to Beyond The Black Rainbow I caught. For months I'd check the local paper day after day in hopes that the film would screen here but nothing. Finally a theater on the other side of town was screening it. I took the drive and all I can say is that it was a life-changing cinematic experience.

What Panos Cosmatos did with this movie is successfully harness the raw power that is 80s romanticism. He ultimately took a vibe that all of us children of the 80s had been yearning for over decades and materialized it via this relentless cinematic homage to those video store fantasies born via VHS covers in the HORROR aisle at the local video store.

Cosmatos did the hardest thing one can achieve in film: he created a vibe. He took that nightmarish yet intoxicating aroma of low budget 80s horror and ****ing translated it like a supernatural linguist.

Beyond The Black Rainbow is a movie I'd played over and over in my head over years of grieving the death of the video store. Its a movie I think lives within all of us lovers of the genre and particularly that time in the genre. We grew up watching Tales From The Darkside and Friday The 13th The Series before bed and begging our folks to let us watch Videodrome in the living room instead of exiling us to the kids room where the NES was overheated and overrated.

Beyond The Black Rainbow is a love letter to the children of the 80s and it gave birth to the "romanticized 80s" genre that continues to grow over time:

-Drive (2011) by Nicolas Winding Refn
-The Guest (2014) by Adam Wingard
-Lost River (2014) by Ryan Gosling
-It Follows (2015) by David Robert Mitchell
-Stranger Things (2016) by The Duffer Bros.

If you loved the legendary decade that was the 80s and miss that HORROR aisle, this is the movie for you.

 

[Asta]

Snikt was the only person in this thread to have actually seen it?

The title came up somewhere and was instantly intriguing, so I sought out the film.

Minutes in I was thinking of Tarkovsky (Stalker, Solaris) and, of course, Kubrik (2001). It's one of those hypnotic films that isn't afraid to linger on an image or a slowly developing scene. The ominous soundtrack was reminiscent of Blade Runner or THX 1138, sometimes just a background rumble evoking the dulled senses of the sedated Elena, or the dreamlike separation from reality under psychotic drugs. With note to the latter the story is evocative of J.G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs - drugs being the key connection.

Beyond the Black Rainbow is an audio/visual experience rather than a straight narrative: it's a story told obliquely, as you might find in some of Ballard, and most of Burroughs. You just let it slowly pull you along, and in.

Spoiler

The theme seemed to be the attempt through science to prevent loss of control in a disorderly, magical world represented by Elena. Of achieving states of heightened consciousness to seek enlightenment through science (drugs), and experience what lies behind and beneath. The black liquid took Nyle's eyes, because the eyes are incapable of seeing beyond the everyday artifice.

However, Elena, who already possesses an otherworldly power, is sedated with anti-psychotic drugs to numb her senses.

Nyle controls the artificial world and everything in it, including Elena. But she manages to escape the artifice and find a real world of nature, which she feels connected to through her bare feet, and then laying down in the grass. To Nyle, where the artifice begins to end, represented by the narrowing of the road, nature begins to close in around him, and finally blocks his route with the fallen tree. Here he's no longer in control, and it's nature that kills him under the command of the magical after Elena makes the roots take hold of his feet, and on being released falls and hits his head on a rock.

 

[Jack D]

I want to track this down. I'm looking forward to seeing Mandy, so I'd like to check this out as well.

 

[Asta]

I want to track this down. I'm looking forward to seeing Mandy, so I'd like to check this out as well.

Now I remember where I saw the reference - it was in the Mandy thread.

Such an evocative title I had to check it out. Also made me think of Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow.

 

[Darth Snoopy]

Man oh man, I forgot about this thread.

 

[Otomofan]

I tried to watch this, but it's utterly unwatchable crap.

I understand it as an art project, but it made for a dreadful movie. There's nothing fun or interesting or original about it. Just endless wankery over an aesthetic.

Call me an old fashioned grump but I like movies that tell stories about characters I can enjoy. This had none of that. This wasn't a movie. This was a two hour youtube sketch called "Memba the 80s? I memba the 80s."