Beyound the Black Rainbow (2010)

After my recent viewing of the 2018 film Mandy I became quite curious to see other films helmed by its director Panos Cosmatos. It turns out that Cosmatos has only one other feature film directing credit, the 2010 Canadian production Beyond the Black Rainbow. Rainbow has many similarities to Mandy, the slow pacing, the violence (though far less of it in this case), science fiction/ fantasy story elements, and both films are set (only principally in Rainbow's case) in the year 1983. In contrast to my viewing experience of Mandy I saw Beyond the Black Rainbow at home, seeing something in the theater, epically when the work is often slow, basically forces continued attention, something I was not able to maintain in this home viewing. I am generally very opposed to multi tasking when viewing a film for the first time, but that was the only way I could get through this movie because it was just so grindingly slow, and I have a far greater tolerance for slow movies then seemingly most people. As a result I mostly skimmed Black Rainbow, so I may have missed some important plot points but I think I got the gist of the thing.

The movie is about a teenage girl (Eva Allan) kept at a research facility run by a vaguely Scientology type group who is testing her for psychic abilities. Eva has a sadistic over sear (Michael Rogers) who at first I thought might be her father, but glancing at the Wikipedia page he is not. The relationship between Eva and Michael is much like the relationship between 11 and Matthew Modine in Strangers Things, even though this movie pre-dates that show by half a decade. The film also evokes a number of other movies and directors in motifs and images, major among these are 2001: A Space Odyssey, Day of the Dead, and the work of David Lynch. The movies got an interesting look and the pacing works at times, but on the whole there is just much to much of it, and far too little happens over too long a period of screen time to maintain my interest. Cosmatos certainly has his tropes and areas of film making interest and I'd be curious to see him continue to explorer those, at least one more time, so given the blahaness of Beyond the Black Rainbow as a film viewing experience for me the best spin I can put on it is that with Mandy at least we know he's improving as a director. *1/2 (I would give this * but I'm giving him some credit for the visuals and overall oddness).