To say Beyond the Black Rainbow is trippy is an understatement, I have a feeling some LSD trips are less intense as this. It is visually stunning with plenty of color filters, distortions, and off-the wall compositions that takes you to a futuristic alternate reality which makes you feel like you are the one on drugs. The only other film I can say had this same effect on me is Enter The Void. Beyond the Black Rainbow will take you on a trip, whether it is a good or bad one is up for you to decide. It is a midnight movie that has cult classic written all over it.

Opening with an infomercial style video set in 1983, Dr. Mercurio Arboria (Scott Hylands) states the purpose of the Arboria Institute. Their goal is to find the “perfect way for people to achieve happiness, contentment, inner peace.” The Institute claims to have found a way to make that dream a reality through their unique practices. I found the whole opening similar eerily similar to the Dharma Initiative training videos from the television series Lost (one of my all-time favorite shows).

Inside the state of the art facilities of Arboria Institute is the administrator Barry Nyle (Michael Rogers) who speaks into the microphone that sounds to the other side of the glass where our film’s mute protagonist Elena (Eva Allan) sits with her head hanging down. She does not look up but rather just sits and listens to what Barry has to say. Almost always he is trying to get a response out of her by saying something like how sorry he was that she never got to meet her mother and how beautiful she was.

Barry is a breathy speaker who seems to have special powers over his patients which he may or may not get from the pills that he takes himself. He is not the only one that contains special powers but no one but he is able to look through the eyes of God, as he puts it. He sees what others cannot, beautiful things like a black rainbows.

Then the film goes off for an hour on a highly stylized head-trip that makes you wonder if the experiment is really on you. Director Pano Cosmatos takes you on a hypnotic trip into an alternate reality on a level that few can achieve through cinema. It is only the beginning and the end that there is much of a plot and subsequently when reality sets back in, which is it’s biggest downfall.

Apparently at one of the Q&A’s, someone asked Cosmatos, “Can you help me understand better” and the first time filmmaker responded in a deadpan tone, “I don’t think I can.” This makes me believe that the director intended the film to not be one that someone understands but rather experiences.

The score is easily the best I have heard this year so far and will likely remain that way. Without it the film would not be the same, it sets the ominous feeling that lingers in the film. It was a score so perfectly fitting that even the synth masters themselves, Daft Punk, would have a hard time replicating the mood.

I think it would be fair to draw some comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey after watching Beyond the Black Rainbow. There is the obvious futuristic aspect where machines with flashing red buttons have tremendous power in a bright white minimalistic environment. Then you have the eerie repetitive soundtrack that accompanies the film nearly the entire time. Even the mood was unusual, creepy, and peculiar, like often found in Kubrick films.

Beyond the Black Rainbow more feels like a dream than anything else, scratch that, a nightmare. There is little to no plot as it ditches everything that is conventional for avant garde. Films like this, ones not driven by story but rather an experience, are the ones that you walk away from not knowing exactly how you feel about them because they are tough to analysis. One thing is for sure, it will likely be the most original film you see in a few years’ time.