Director Richard Linklater tackles the unsettling world of Philip K. It's a vision of the future that feels as if it might as well be the present, set "seven years from now" in a Californian milieu that's a mixture of high-tech and low-life. An undercover cop, on the trail of a mind-altering drug called Substance D, becomes increasingly uncertain about his role in the investigation and his own grasp on reality.
Linklater returns to a style he employed in an earlier work, Waking Life, using live action and transforming it with rotoscope animation. Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey jnr and Winona Ryder play the main roles. The effect of the animation is not to diminish the quality of the performances but to heighten them.
A Scanner Darkly is a combination of gritty realism and disorienting hallucination, and it's not always easy to tell which - a confusion that lies at the philosophical heart of the film. Director Richard Linklater tackles the unsettling world of Philip K.
News RSS