If you enjoyed Tarkovsky's Solaris, Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey or Godard's Alphaville then this might be up your alley. It's a slow paced surreal sci fi film, with warbling, droning synth music, 80's film colouring and the occasional blurred visuals as if you are sedated. Which if fitting as it tells the story of a powerful young girl being held captive and under sedation by a mysterious and futuristic cult, that seems to be conducting some kind of scientific experimentation. Very little really happens in most of the film, just striking visuals, long stares, pulsing lights (matched by a pulsing synth soundtrack),and slow shots of the kind of things that people thought to be futuristic back in the 80's. If you like the sound of any of this then check it out, if not then definitely give it a miss and save yourself the time.

Its a well done enough horror/suspense/David Cronenberg esque wtf kind of film--but after a while i kind of just wanted them to cut to the chase already. by which i mean there's a lot of set up and a lot of artfully done goosing of that set up--but it takes a good hour and a half if not longer before the actual ch as/confrontation between the two main characters that you spend most of the film waiting to happen finally happens. Don't get me wrong--this movie is trying and succeeds to a varying degree at capturing a certain style and certain flavor of suspense horror film---the director is quite clearly a fan of early Cronenberg--there's not just the obvious nod to Scanners but there's nods to The Brood and Shivers and even a slight one to videodrome in here as well (at least i thought i caught those maybe i'm wrong i don't know) and there are nods to other scare films of the early 80's as well--and certainly the whole tone and pace and set design and wardrobe and just everything about it is very much on the money for a suspense film from the early part of that decade--but i don't know, the movie also had a sort of sleepy effect on me---like as psychedelic as the director wants the movie to be (and it definitely is) you can only indulge in that kind of style so much before you just end up putting a guy like me into a kind of coma--and not the cool trance like one that i'm sure the director was hoping his film would have on its audience. You know there's only so much ranting and raving i could take from the good psychotic doctor and there's only so much self defense scenes i could take from the woman in the mental hospital before a part of me just wanted to scream Get on with it already movie! but eventually the movie does--and it does it well enough---but not so well enough that i can't help but think this movie should have probably been at least a half hour shorter then it was. Ehh whatever---i'm positive it will find its audience soon enough anyways and it will have a nice cult like following in the years to come--much like Cronenberg's early stuff does too.

Beyond the Black Rainbow is a very strange film.Its a supreme WTF film. Its a trippy movie that thirty years ago would have been a regular at midnight screenings. Its a visually stunning film with a wonderfully weird soundscape soundtrack. It's a stylistic throw back to the pretentious but cheap horror and science fiction films of the early 1980's (some of which came from Europe). It's full of riffs and references to at least a dozen or so other films...

...it's also pretentious twaddle, way too long and has one of the biggest "you have got to be joking" endings in years. It's an ending that just wrecks pretty much all the good will it may have created (seriously I could feel the audience at the Tribeca Film Festival, which struggled with this film to the bitter end, suddenly break with it at the end).

The plot of the film has something to do with a weird clinic in 1983 where a strange man runs strange tests on young woman. What exactly is going on is never fully explained but it has something to do with an experiment years before, about the time the young lady was born. There are theses weird guys in suits, and straitjackets and psychic powers...

...and other than that you're on you're own.

On a certain level I like the film. I liked the throw back nature of it. I loved the look of the film (the color scheme is amazing and some of the images are haunting)and the retro electronic score. I liked the enigma and the references (Phantasm, Soylent Green, The Final Programme, 2001 and others). I also liked that we aren't told anything and that we have to piece most of it together.

What I don't like is the glacial pace, which makes this a long 110 minutes, Nor do I like the finale which turns the film from head trip to slasher film to the wrong sort of joke in the course of about five minutes. Seriously the next to last bit just wrecked the film.

Then again, if you can forgive the out of left field, "oh crap we're out of time so lets sum this up" ending (which is hard since it's kind of a cop out),I'll recommended for the patient and adventurous film goer. If you want form over substance and can allow yourself to get lost in the trippy sound and image you'll probably think it was worth a go...then again there were several walk outs.