Retro Sci-fi Paranoia in the Beyond the Black Rainbow Trailer

Black holes are turning into eyes. People are crawling through walls. Syringes are popping into frame. It’s all very opaque and fascinating. I don’t know what’s going on and neither will you after you watch the trailer for Panos Cosmatos’ sci-fi mind bender, Beyond the Black Rainbow (below).

Opening with a retro new-agey infomercial a la the trailer from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’s, this newly released trailer for Beyond the Black Rainbow has a slow steady build toward a trippy explosion, complete with a retro Kubrick and Tarkovsky-reminiscent style and haunting music, teasing at the psychedelic confrontation between doctor and patient. It’s near impossible to understand most of what’s going on, but here’s the official synopsis from the film’s Tribeca Film Festival page from last year:

Panos Cosmatos brings a bold, Kubrickian vision to the screen in stunning detail in this sci-fi fable of a young woman imprisoned in an experimental laboratory and the enigmatic scientist who is her captor. Set in a futuristic 1983, Elena finds herself held against her will in a mysterious facility under the watchful eye of the sinister Dr. Barry Nyle. Pushed to her limits, Elena is left with no choice but to navigate an escape from her labyrinthine prison, in the process revealing its hidden secrets.

At once creatively futuristic and hypnotically retro, Beyond the Black Rainbow evokes the spirit of classic 1970s and ’80s science fiction films through its vintage-inspired chromatic cinematography, elaborate set pieces, and an authentically retro sci-fi score composed entirely on analog synthesizers by Black Mountain’s Jeremy Schmidt. With all the makings of a cult classic, Beyond the Black Rainbow is sure to absorb viewers in its unique dystopian futurescape, and marks the trippy, exciting debut of a promising new talent in the science fiction world.

This Canadian sci-fi film was actually completed in 2010, made the festival rounds in 2011 (most notably Tribeca and Fantasia) and now it’s finally getting a domestic release by Magnet. The festival reviews have looked pretty divisive, engendering the same sort of responses that Enter the Void and Tree of Life seemed to have: viewers are either bored out of their minds or entranced by the experience. While I wasn’t too huge a fan of either of those films, I’m definitely glad they exist for their sheer uniqueness, and I’m looking forward to Black Rainbow for very much the same reason.

Written by Tarun Shanker (@tuna365)

After tragically losing his childhood innocence by watching Steven Seagal kick a man under a train in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory, Tarun emerged from the shadows to graduate from NYU with a degree in Film & English and become a mild-mannered New York City assistant by day and a… More »