Cosmatos seems intent on focusing each shot on a specific moment, stretching every minute into an eternity. Do you compare a freshmen writing major’s first workshop story to James Joyce’s “The Dead”? No.īeyond the Black Rainbow is awesome in the Kantian sense. Of course Cosmatos’ indie, cult-ready debut is going to falter in comparison. No one could have crafted a two-and-a-half-hour jaunt into the oblivion of humanity’s darkest, furthest-reaching depravity and brilliance with as much precision as Kubrick purged of compassion, emotion, feeling (Kubrick allegedly picked the actors because they weren’t very good, and he wanted the visuals to tell the story, not the performers), 2001 is arguably the greatest film any American has contributed to the Pantheon of Cinema. No one but Kubrick could create a film as vivid, lucid, nightmarish, gorgeous, enlightening, epiphanic, and terrifying as 2001.

Comparing Cosmatos to Kubrick is unfair, of course-no one measures up to Kubrick. Everything gleams, everything reflects if Hal prevailed at the end of 2001, he may have created a world not very different from this.įilmed in 2010 but released in the good ol’ US of A this year, Panos Cosmatos’ debut film drew harsh responses from critics some said you’d have to be high to enjoy it (do NOT try that-you’ll probably slip into a coma, or at the very least suffer some sort of mental degradation), while others decried Cosmatos’ obvious devotion to Kubrick. It evokes a strange, surreal sense of paranoid hallucination and dependence, psychosis, insanity, obsession, and withdrawal-a two-hour, painful crawl down an antiseptic corridor as the last bleary blur of a bad high washes over you. Beyond the Black Rainbow feels like someone is pouring melted celluloid onto your retinas.

Beyond a black rainbow