A warning to others: seeing a film about drug addiction, paranoia, hallucinations and corporate corruption at 11am on a sleepy Sunday may cause subsequent strange behaviours, including, but not limited to, buying what appears to be a fedora minutes after the film has ended, even though the hat does not appear in the film.
Originally a novel by Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly tells the story of Bob Arctor, an undercover narcotics agent who’s trying to root out the supplier of a new, instantly-addictive drug known as Substance D, and who becomes addicted himself in the process, developing a split personality and growing increasingly bewildered and paranoid when he is ordered to keep himself under observation after becoming the prime suspect.
Arctor is played by Keanu Reeves, who retains his trademark inability to act any other emotion beyond ‘confused’ even when those emotions are being painted on top of his actual face. After becoming addicted to Substance D he begins to develop a split personality after the two hemispheres of his brain separate and begin competing for supremacy. Sometimes he is Fred, the narc who spends his working day, just as all his colleagues do, in a ‘scramble suit’, which constantly broadcasts random faces and outfits to prevent anybody from ever identifying him.
Other times, he’s Arctor, a nobody junkie with nobody junkie friends and a frigid cocaine addict for a lover, played by Winona Ryder. Arctor is never in control of his own life, being both betrayed by his friends, spurned by his needy girlfriend and manipulated by his colleagues throughout the film, and the concluding revelations are far more damning of big corporations than they are of drug users, seen here as helpless victims of their own choices.
Like many of Philip K. Dick’s works, while the overarching plot is serious, within that is a fair bit of dark comedy — watching the paranoid ramblings of James Barries and Ernie Luckman (Robert Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson respectively, both playing to type) is endlessly entertaining. It’s only Rory Cochrane’s Charles Freck — suicidal, convinced that he’s covered in aphids and seeing alien creatures who read his lifetime of sins back to him — who really seems to have gone over the edge, so despite concluding with a note from Philip K. Dick, listing the friends he has lost to drugs, the portrayal of the junkies seems strangely muted, and not shocking at all. The anti-establishment message is very strong; the anti-drug message less so.
Visually the film is impressive. The animation could very easily have been overdone but is refreshingly subtle, helping to give the film a vaguely-disturbed, slightly otherworldly feel to it without going too far over the top — it’s enough to remind you that not everything is right without becoming too much of a distraction (it also allows for some nice touches such as Freck being able to see Barries’ cartoon thoughts.)
I really enjoyed A Scanner Darkly. Though the plot isn’t quite as torturous as some other Dick stories, there are enough twists and turns to keep you guessing until the end as to how much of Arctor’s life has been down to his own bad choices, and how much was down to other people pulling the strings around him. Definitely one to watch again.