Review of A Scanner Darkly (2006) by Ajai K — 18 Oct 2014

Scanner darkly presents us a world perhaps not entirely impossible in the near future, and considering the fact that it was written in the year 1977, this was some pretty powerful foreshadowing, but the reality of the fictional world that the characters inhabit is different from ours in the sense that the society has degenerated far enough that the ruling elite finds ample reason to preserve the status quo. The sense of paranoia and loss of identity is manifested in two ways: the physical form in the shape of the Substance D and that of the intangible but ever-pervading surveillance police state.

The narrative follows an under cover cop into his lives of double identity and tumultuous experience of living everyday while consuming addictive substances and maintaining a covert identity which leads him into disassociation from who he really is, which he cannot never find, because it is something he has relinquished a long time ago. The characters who inhabit their world are ordinary people turning themselves in because there is little that they can enjoy while a police state surveys, most of the conversations and the personality traits that the characters exhibit are typical of ones who've resigned themselves from society. Self-imposed exiles living on a supple of drugs and their own idiosyncrasies to keep company. The performances that the cast displays are stellar as each one of the gets inside the skin of the character and plays it out authentically.

The visuals, animation drawn over live-action shots are hypnotic and captivating as it is able to manipulate real footage to evoke mystic that which it inherently cannot possess but with the help of animations becomes entrancing. Having experimented with the same technique before in 'Waking Life', Linklater uses it deftly to bring out its magic and make it an essential part of the whole experience.

There exists a lot of themes that are conveyed out in intellectually stimulating conversations or you could a load of pseudo-gibberish, depending on the perspective. But it does create a sort of distance between the conventional audience and those of us who are intellectually competent to deduce the themes and concepts that it seeks to project: that of a world being slowly degenerated into a state of paranoia. The film may be guilty of capturing the greater feelings of the world by using the characters as a means to he end that have the characters have heir story arc intrinsically intertwined with the narrative themes so as to feel greater empathy.

Science-fiction dystopia have become a staple genre of the everyday films and they are quite ubiquitous but rarely we find ones which are really self-conscious, visually stimulating, conceptually engrossing and takes on the saturated genre and give a fresh sense of purpose and vision.