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Rating: "M for murder. M for missing, where everyone abandons everyone else..."
In 1977, Philip K. Dick published "A Scanner Darkly," considered by many to be one of the most intense and poignant novels about drugs.
Set in a future that is certainly not too distant, the book describes a Los Angeles devastated by the psychotropic effects of a new synthetic drug: Substance M (for "murder," obviously called "Substance D" in the original version), which causes mental dissociation, terrifying visions, and personality splits. Substance M spreads pervasively, but both its origin and the identity of the traffickers are unknown: uncovering who manages the trafficking is the task of Bob Arctor, a narcotics agent who will live as an undercover addict in a group of junkies, to discover useful details with the help of an innovative recording device that allows not only to film his suspects but to explore his hidden side in a completely new way.
What makes Dick's novel unforgettable is its complete fusion of reality and science fiction: which part is real? Which is imaginary? The unexpected ending is truly poignant, touching on notes of lyricism that I remember being equally powerful only in Blade Runner.
In 2006, Richard Linklater decided to create a faithful film adaptation of the novel, shot with the "Rotoscoping" technique (already used in the previous "Waking Life"): the film is shot with live actors, after which the digital footage is extracted and transformed into an animated film, with a final visual effect halfway between video game cel shading and a watercolor painting about to dissolve. An absolutely winning choice.
Ranked among the films with the longest post-production in cinema history (about 18 months), "A Scanner Darkly" is a very deserving adaptation of Dick's literary universe: the aesthetic achieved through the use of rotoscoping is exceptional, creating a very strange mix of the actors' absolutely real expressions and an appearance that has little or nothing to do with reality. Needless to say, the viewer will be 100% involved in the story being told. The film gives us a disorienting, liquefied, unreal vision: it puts us in empathy with the protagonist's visions, his paranoia, his progressive cerebral disintegration. There comes a point where one is really confused about how reliable the images on screen are, leaving one somewhat dazed amidst the devastating mental self-destruction that affects the characters and a strange disorientation due to the rotoscoping, which makes the image continually sharp and shaky at the same time.
The cast is also very cohesive: the acting based on the expressiveness of Keanu Reeves is even heightened by the conversion to animation; good performances also from Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr., who portrays an absolutely crazy junkie.
If reading the paper counterpart was disturbing, the image amplifies these sensations, making them tangible and shareable: this is one of the reasons why I consider the film an enhancement of the book experience; those who have not read the novel from which it is adapted will still find themselves in front of a very valid film, absolutely engaging, bitter, and with a poignant ending.
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