romper-2

I loved this film. It's a subtle, layered and measured work with good performances and a wonderful use of music and sound design. The story is well paced and again I see it in musical terms with the crescendos and diminuendos carefully crafted and motifs re-occurring throughout. I also found it a visual pleasure - well lit and photographed.

For a lot of the time, the soundscape echoes the tinnitus of the lead character. Constable McGann is a man isolated in several senses and the film hovers for the most part, like he does, on the periphery of a horrendous and senseless crime. This isn't really a police procedural, but an exploration of the lives affected by the event - the locals sitting just outside the event horizon and in danger of getting sucked into the vortex.

There's knowledge hidden from us, the audience, and also events and motivations that are hidden from the protagonists - even those directly affected by them and involving them. To that extent, this movie reminds me a lot of Memento.Meaning unfolds and understanding grows as the film progresses, but at the end, you are deliberately left with pieces missing from the jigsaw puzzle. It seems to me that you are meant to be left with a sense of the fragility of society; a sense that there will always be gaps in the way we understand our relationships to others and in the way our lives play out.

I love the way that the movie ends with austere credits rolling over a couple of minutes of silence, before sound in the form of an orchestra creeps back into our perception, instrument by instrument. We share the hero's aural affliction throughout the movie and the silence and re-introduction of sound offers a sense of change and resolution - and maybe hope.

Sometimes a film can hit you on a visceral level, taking a known story and augmenting it. That's what happened to me watching this film. The book was strange and fun, and I appreciated it as telling a powerful story about addiction and power and paranoia. My lack of personal experience with addiction and the drug culture diminished my appreciation for the power of the storytelling though, I think.

The movie brings a visual rawness, with the combination of the performances and the animation allowing for those elements in the book like the scramble suit and the hallucinations to be better conveyed. All the main performances, especially those of Keanu Reeves and Robert Downey Jr., were great. Perhaps the personal experiences he and Winona Ryder had were major factors in how they portrayed their characters, but that's not to diminish from Philip K. Dick's great writing.

If you're happy in your bourgeois suburban lifestyle; if you don't want to be challenged about your beliefs in the goodness of the institutions that you trust to protect and provide for you, you should avoid this movie. If you have a feeling that not all is right with the world; that law enforcement and the fight against terrorism is flawed and can even be a danger to society; that drug companies may not be out to serve our best interests; that parts of our society are willing to sacrifice us for their own selfish interests, then this film will appeal to you.

By the way, the animation is inspiring. This is a top-notch film.