A Scanner Darkly
d. Richard Linklater, 2006
With a little more than half of 2006 gone, Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly is easily one of - if not the - best films of the year. Using the same animation technique as in his 2001 masterpiece Waking Life, Linklater and his animators craft a wonderfully obstuse meditation on the drug culture. As a complete turnaround from his last serious project, Before Sunset, this film represents a more free-form type of narrative resembling something like Naked Lunch way more than Dazed and Confused or Before Sunrise. At the centre of the film is Keanu Reeves' character, Bob Arctor, an undercover agent who is supposed to spy on potential drug users. The action takes place "7 years from now" according to a title card, a time when 20% of the population is addicted to a drug called Substance D. "You are either on it or you haven't tried it," exclaims Robert Downey Jr.'s character when talking to a drug addled Rory Cochrane (who played the playful Slater in Linklater's Dazed and Confused, the complete opposite of his paranoid addict here). A Scanner Darkly comes down to a series of sequences following the set of drug users (of which Arctor is one), and the Phillip K. Dick narrative seems to organically grow out of these scenes. By the end, I was completely blown away by both the visuals of the film (it's a thrill to see on the big screen, so don't wait for video) and it's uncompromising take on the world of drugs. Without a doubt, no film out there right now is as astonishing as this one.
