Beyond the Black Rainbow is a great film if you liked the colors presented in the Suspiria (1977) post.
The score was also one of my most favorite scores starting with Forever Dilating Pupils in the first scene of the film. So much so, and to my wife’s discontent, it was my alarm clock for about 4 weeks before I was told to quit my shit causing her to experience anxiety and dread as her first emotion of the day.
The film is the directorial debut of Panos Cosmatos, who later went on to create Mandy, which was the antithesis to Beyond the Black Rainbow which he wrote in parallel to expel all his unstructured energy during the time he was writing the highly structured Beyond the Black Rainbow.
So if you’ve seen Mandy, don’t pass judgement on BtBR because of it. If you haven’t seen Mandy: it’s like any other Nic Cage movie, but a tad bit trippier much like Color Out of Space, which I also cannot recommend.
Fun fact: Nicolas Cage wanted to play the part of Mandy’s husband who had his wife, Mandy, violently murdered as he was left for dead by a pack of drugged out religious bikers since “that character resonated deeply with him.” O_O
Another fun fact: Beyond the Black Rainbow was funded on royalties from his father’s film Tombstone.
This film is a spiritual re-imagining of the first half of Michael Bay’s The Island which is a re-imagining of THX 1138 which is the feature-length film based on George Lucas’ short Electronic Labyrinth THX 1138 4EB, had it been shot in 2010 but set in 1983. So if you’ve seen any of these films you have a general sense of the genre you’re heading into, but masterfully produced and more enjoyable than THX 1138.
Fair warning, I once made a friend cry during a screening of this film. Granted, we were a bit fucked up so take that information with a grain of salt.
Also my father, who remarkably watched the entire film without taking a smoke break (which is SUPER rare for him) said he didn’t like the movie (not at all rare from him) because it was a movie about “hopelessness”, which is a fair adjective although I would have chosen the word “dread”.
I hope you enjoy the pen scene, the beautiful colors, the gritty vintage texture, the outrun driving scene, the homage to Suspiria’s hallway scene, and the ink scene. Plus, I wish there was more background for the sentionaut, but I loved the character all the same.