Beyond the Black Rainbow

Saw Beyond the Black Rainbow, another film by Cosmatos, the guy who directed Mandy.  His movies are really interesting.  Definitely ominous and dismal, but packed with color and a refreshing lack of monsters and aliens or whatever.  This film is set in a futuristic, 2001 Space Odyssey-style psychiatric lab run by gaunt, pale dude who looks like Supreme Leader Snoke.   His paleness however allows him to soak up the lighting like a sponge, becoming green or orange or (most often) deep red.  He speaks in a slow, serious, intense, mocking kind of way to everyone.  He sounds sarcastic but stays with this strange, sensual, writhing energy that's very off-putting.  It's only major drawback is that it's terribly slow however.

As with Mandy, this film derives its magical horror from psychedelics.  In a flashback to the 60s, we see some strange, drug-powered psychiatric experiment on consciousness go wrong, resulting in otherworldly horror and strange spectacle.  I feel this is a sort of update to the Cthulhu mythos: a man drives himself to edges of sanity and there finds inspiration or possession perhaps that wrecks a terrible evil on the land.  In this film, nothing's fully explained, but there's a lot of sinister shit and strange imagery.  Even though everything comes from ordinary drugs and sensory deprivation, it feels like aliens or demons or something.  It's very mysterious and purposeful - dare I say eldritch?

So but the main drawback is that it is quite slow.  You get to soak in every frame of strange imagery, but it crawls by like a snake.  The main character is full of pregnant pauses and long silences, punctuated by spasmodic twitches. The strange imagery does come, but slowly.  The film was interesting to me, but so slow that I don't know I'd want to see it again.  It kind of has to be seen alone because otherwise I think jokes and half-baked speculation will start filling up the pregnant pauses.

Lastly: here's a random head-cannon of mine you can use to blow your mind: what if this film was the prequel to Carrie?