Panos Cosmatos

(On Cable TV, March 2020) I tried and failed to get to the end of Beyond the Black Rainbow a few years ago, but with the success of writer-director Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy and a vague sentiment of unfinished business, I went back to the film and… well, I finished it. The story is both obtuse and simplistic, what with a young woman trying to escape a failing research institute, a creepy facility founder, a killer entity trying to prevent her from leaving, and 1970s-inspired visuals. Still, the point of Beyond the Black Rainbow is not the plot as much as the atmosphere, as everything is from an alternate 1983 steeped in grainy psychedelic colours. The imagery is admittedly terrific (especially on the film’s somewhat low budget) and there are some interesting threads to pull if your thing is overanalyzing movies—the most promising of them being a repudiation of the kinds of things that a lesser film would have celebrated. But if upgrading my assessment of Beyond the Black Rainbow from “unwatchable” to “interesting” is a significant improvement, it’s not necessarily a recommendation. Or at least not for everyone: It may be that I’ve become a more tolerant viewer for artistic experiments in the past few years. At the very least, this is not a film for everyone at any given time.