The future is anything but bright in Richard Linklater's animated dystopian fantasy.
Adapted from the mind-bending novel by Philip K Dick, A Scanner Darkly imagines a haunting vision of the near future, in which the war on terrorism has been supplanted by the war on drug abuse.
Linklater replicates the look and feel of a graphic novel through an advanced form of the interpolated rotoscoping animation, first devised for his 2001 film Waking Life.
Having shot and edited a live action version of the film on digital video, the writer-director delivered A Scanner Darkly to a 30-strong team of animators, who painstakingly painted over the top of each frame to create distinctive visuals. The 15 months required to create 100 minutes of footage delivers a veritable feast for the senses.
Seven years hence, America is no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave, but the land of the chemically induced and the home of confused. The human population's desperate efforts to escape reality via widely available narcotics have created a deeply unhappy, self-destructive Generation Excess in the vice-like grip of paranoia.
One of the most popular narcotics is Substance D, a powerful hallucinogen, which has the unfortunate side effect of creating split personalities in the user.
Undercover police officer Fred (Keanu Reeves) is one of the foot soldiers trying to eradicate the drug from suburban Orange County, California. Using the name Bob Arctor, Fred is ordered to gather intelligence about drug consumption and dealing. Unfortunately, Fred is hooked on the illegal drug and is losing the ability to distinguish between his selves.
A Scanner Darkly remains faithful to Dick's source text and Linklater is in no hurry to make sense of the characters' delusional ramblings. Animators have conjured truly incredible sequences, such as Charles scratching furiously as he hallucinates hundreds of lice crawling over his body, or Jim's amusing metamorphosis into a giant cockroach.
Even more impressive are the scramble suits worn by the undercover cops, which shimmer with the characteristics of millions of different people, thereby cloaking the true identity of the wearer. For all its visual invention, A Scanner Darkly is a hallucinogenic triumph of style over (illegal) substance.
The film disappears up its own proverbial narrative, lost in a deluge of verbal diarrhoea that will probably leave you scratching your head or, even worse, nursing a headache.
Movie double-acts come in all shapes and sizes ...and with varying degrees of success.
Click here