Jamin Winans
Ink

An old sage once said that culture must be spread as widely as possible.

If we come across a work (music, film, book, etc.) that manages to strike us, to fascinate us, perhaps even to transform us, indeed, after enjoying it, we find ourselves talking about it with our friends, hoping to convince them to experience the same. Sometimes we succeed, sometimes we don't. The fact is, the less known the work, the more we feel the desire to spread it, confident that it hasn't enjoyed the right promotion on more noble channels and/or mass channels.

Such is the case with Ink, a film I happened to see a couple of months ago during one of my moments of boredom as an exile, on the recommendation of my roommate.

It is an independent American film, made with a budget of about $250,000 (to understand, the first alcoholic Charlie Sheen of Hollywood takes about a million a day), and it has quickly become a cult film, at least for those who know of its existence. Via torrent. Without a minimal means of propagation. Which means that anyone who has seen this film fell in love with it immediately and talked about it somehow. Why? A simple answer, in providing which I will have to refer to another maxim: what makes a narrative work great is not the plot itself but the way it is told. And no case could be more emblematic of this: I could sum up the plot of Ink for you in seven words, yet I won't, otherwise, I'd spoil all the magic and surprise of the film for you.

Instead, I will say that the plot is split on two different dimensional planes, and the scenes that chase each other throughout the film jump from one plane to another in an apparently random manner. Not only that, the various scenes describe very different situations. Some are centered on the most banal daily life. Others are absolutely fantastic and in a fairytale world. Still, others seem to have come out of the forest of flying daggers. Only some scenes are reprised at key moments of the film, and thanks to these, one manages to piece together the pieces of an extraordinary puzzle.

You won't fully understand what it's about until the last quarter of an hour. You will clearly glimpse the struggle between good and evil that is in every man and guides his real life. However, Ink projects this struggle into the dream dimension, where on one side there are beings who produce our dreams, and on the other the entities responsible for our inkubi (and here you understand the title of the film). These characters are then created with a truly refined aesthetic taste, often they're strange, other times enigmatic, still, others seem incomprehensible. The depiction of the surreal dimension is truly fantastic, so much so that this is, in my opinion, a film to watch more than to listen to (I refer to the dialogues, because even the soundtrack is truly suggestive), as if we were still children in the world of dreams, helpless spectators of a struggle bigger than us.

I will say no more, one must watch to understand.

9.5