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A Scanner Darkly

A Scanner Darkly

Richard Linklater

  • 2006
  • USA
  • Science-fiction / Animation
  • 1h40mn
  • Original version with French subtitles
  • Color
In the near future, an undercover policeman must investigate the effects of Substance M, a new highly dangerous drug. Testing it on himself, he gradually loses his sense of identity.
Superlatives are lacking to describe A Scanner Darkly. With the use of rotoscoping as a stroke of genius, the best way to convey the distortion of reality, the feeling of loss of conscience and the hazy perspective of a junkie, Richard Linklater signs one of the best Philip K. Dick adaptations. The viewer feels like a scrambled transmitter, much like the protagonists, swallowed up. The filmmaker has fully captured the writer’s metaphorical essence and transmits it, making his pain tangible. Through this formally fascinating piece, this anticapitalist firebrand, Linklater brings to the screen the writer’s very substance, and his scream. Hallucinatory and deeply moving.

Laurent Courau / La Spirale

Set in a near future, where paranoïa and blurred identities intertwine in a society imploding under the combined effects of drugs and mass surveillance. Ring a bell? Richard Linklater questions, not without irony, our relation to the collapse of the last shreds of consensual reality that kept the old world’s activity going.

Screenings

04/09 • 14h15 • Screen 500
Session presented by Laurent Courau

Credits

  • With : Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson, Rory Cochrane...
  • Production : Richard Linklater (based on the novel by Philip K. Dick)
  • Photography : Shane F. Kelly
  • Editing : Sandra Adair
  • Music by : Graham Reynolds
  • Production : Tommy Pallotta, Jonah Smith, Erwin Stoff, Anne Walker-McBay, Palmer West