After premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival this spring, Panos Cosmatos’ Beyond the Black Rainbow is making the “genre” festival rounds—Fantasia, Fantastic Fest, others— where it’s been met with either adulation or confusion. The latter because, I think, Black Rainbow doesn’t fit comfortably in the genre mould, despite the fact that it’s indisputably informed by decades of sci-fi cinema—most specifically the florid fantastical offerings of the 1970s and ‘80s, to which it makes explicit, frequent homage.
In that sense, the film is sci-fi through and through, but at the same time it’s an unabashed art film: slow, challenging, even austere. This isn’t the supposedly grown-ass-man science fiction of Moon or Monsters. It’s something more ambitious, less welcoming, but much more rewarding.
Sculpted from deeply saturated blacks, reds and blues, it’s a film you submerge yourself into like an isolation tank of the kind you might find in the institute where the film mostly take place. Set in a very specific 1983—the VHS 1983 of Brainstorm, The Dead Zone and, of course, Videodrome—Beyond the Black Rainbow slowly, deliberately unspools the story of a frightened young girl (Eva Allan) under observation in the mostly empty Arboria Institute (“Serenity Through Technology”), overseen by the troubled, fascinatingly coiffured Barry Niles (Michael Rogers). Niles’ motives are obscure, his actions and reactions cryptic. Cosmatos lets us space out on the meticulously art-directed Arboria’s tense surroundings, playing scenes out with calculated, even frustrating patience, all wrapped in a period-perfect analog synth score by Jeremy Schmidt (Sinoia Caves, Black Mountain).
And just when its pace feels like it’s about to grate, just when you start to think that Cosmatos is not being so much oblique as stingy with the narrative, the film changes spectacularly, with a truly remarkable, sublimely creepy psychedelic flashback sequence that at once tells you everything you need to know about the first half of the movie and prepares you for the rest. It’s been a while since I’ve seen something so startlingly strange and evocative; I don’t want to say much more about this sequence except that it has been stuck in my imagination for days since I saw it.
And here’s where I’m duty-bound to admit that I know Panos, that we’ve had an intermittent friendship of telephone calls, movie chats and occasional hangs since I first met him at a friend’s apartment sometime in the early 2000s. So take all of this with a big grain of salt if you must—though I spent 10 years as a film critic and I’m pretty sure I know when to trust my gut. Beyond the Black Rainbow is, in my opinion, one of the most refreshingly imaginative and accomplished sci-fi films I’ve seen in years, and certainly one of the most exciting Canadian films in a long, long time. Magnet and Mongrel have picked it up for distribution in the U.S. and Canada, respectively; I hope you get a chance to see it soon.
