Set in an alternate version of 1983, in a commune called Arboria, the rich and strange debut of Panos Cosmatos is an effective homage to the brain bending trips of Kubrick, Cronenberg, or Ken Russell at their finest. Stark and striking, fiercely inventive, and stunningly visualized with vividly disturbing and at times gory imagery, the film plays more like an hypnagogic hallucination than a coherent narrative. The director uses unsettling visuals, an enhanced synth score and the fate of his mute, telepathic protagonist Elena to explore notions of control, both of the mind and the physical world, managing to create a sensory masterpiece that is best viewed on the big-screen. This gorgeous trip down the memory lane will take you to the opposite side of the rainbow of conventional narrative into the black pond of limitless nostalgic imagination.
