Fantastic Fest 2011

Driector Panos Cosmatos in attendance

Young Elena has been a prisoner her entire life, her world consisting of four stark white walls and a single window. On the other side of that window is Doctor Barry Nyle. Is he Elena’s salvation or her tormenter? Will she ever be free to live a normal life? And what, pray tell, is the exact purpose of the mysterious glowing pyramid at the center of the institute that contains them both?

BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW is a psychedelic head trip of the highest order, born of the pre-teen fantasies of writer-director Panos Cosmatos as he browsed through early 1980s Canadian sci-fi and horror VHS tapes that he would never be allowed to rent. Cosmatos captures the aesthetics of an era eff ortlessly while fusing those influences into something bold, visionary, and entirely his own.

The accomplished music video director – he’s done work for The Handsome Furs, among others – plunges the audience into a sort of sensory overload as he fuses elements of Reagan-era paranoia, social engineering run amok, and a drug-fueled step up the evolutionary ladder to create a hypnotic experience that plays out like a Tarkovsky-style sci-fi picture as filtered through the visual style of LOGAN’S RUN.

Michael Rogers delivers a mesmerizing performance as Barry Nyle, hiding a layer of obsession and…something else…beneath his cold and clinical exterior. But as gripping as Rogers is, the world that Cosmatos creates is the real star, the visuals providing a truly immersive experience matched by the original score composed by Black Mountain’s Jeremy Schmidt entirely on vintage analog synthesizers. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em and just let it all wash over you. (Todd Brown)