Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)

Directed by: Panos Cosmatos | 110 minutes | science fiction | Actors: Michael Rogers, Eva Allan, Scott Hylands, Marilyn Norry, Rondel Reynoldson, Ryley Zinger, Gerry South, Chris Gauthier, Geoffrey Conder, Roy Campsall, Richard Jollymore, Christian Sloan, Sara Stockstad

Panos Cosmatos presents his debut ‘Beyond the Black Rainbow’ as a profound futuristic dream world full of surreal images and light shows. Although the film will go into the books under the science fiction genre, this does not cover the load. With hardly a single story, the director mainly tries to portray the penetrating captivity of the future commune of Arboria. The fact that this only partially succeeds is because the filmmaker goes too far in his experiments; by completely losing sight of the medium, almost no film remains.

Leading actor Michael Rogers, as the dominating doctor, has to carry the first part of the film, where it is explained with minimal dialogue and images how the commune functions. However, the film really starts to get loose when one of the residents tries to escape. It is these moments when Cosmatos – son of Rambo director George Pan Cosmatos – puts aside his urge to experiment and actually tries to make a film of ‘Beyond the Black Rainbow’. The soundtrack, which consists solely of computer sounds, actually begins to sustain the images and the continuous metamorphoses of the characters seem to serve a purpose. It’s a shame that Michael Rogers’ version of a terrifying doctor is always just not good enough, leaving the rest of the cast way behind anyway. As a result, the level drops to far below the minimum at times, and there is little more left of the film than a succession of light effects under a synthesizer soundtrack (which is very on the nerves especially in the beginning).

‘Beyond the Black Rainbow’ can thus be called more of a video installation, a hallucinatory trip, and with a slightly more restrained experimental drive from director Cosmatos, the project would have met a better fate. The choices are bold and it’s clear that he wanted to make a completely original film with a grand vision, but he went too far. Now experimental science fiction is doomed to a forgettable fate, until a possible cult status will lift the film out of it