Beyond The Black Rainbow is a horror sci fi film that takes place at the Arboria Institute in 1983 and predominantly focuses on the interactions between a doctor and his patient, but the relationship seems more sadistic and obsessive than professional. What kind of work has been going on at the Arboria Institute for seventeen years?
After seeing Mandy, I immediately put Panos Cosmatos’ first film, Beyond The Black Rainbow, in my queue. The first time that you watch this film, you won’t want to because the movie is so mercilessly immersive in an oppressive insane world that you will want to escape while not recognizing that you are identifying with Elena, a teenage girl confined in a strange facility. By the end of the film, you’ll want to see it again, and you’ll be sad that you didn’t see it on the big screen. It feels like Mandy was the reprise of this film. It is a shame that I didn’t see it on the big screen because it requires your complete attention since it is so detailed that you could blink and miss an important detail. I’m not kidding. If it feels like you’re watching a bad drug trip, you are.
My main problem with Beyond The Black Rainbow is that it needs subtitles to fully understand some scenes, which I only understood after my first viewing when I read about the film before watching it a second time. Even without subtitles, Cosmatos’ films (all two of them) primarily communicate visually, which all films should do, and has a dream logic, which means while your rational brain will be asking, “What the hell is going on,” you will viscerally understand what you are watching even if you are reluctant to admit it—like the smoking nurse in this film.
Beyond The Black Rainbow’s narrative structure is unlike anything that I expected not because it is new, but because of the way that Cosmatos executes it. A viewer could easily dismiss the beginning of the film since it seems like archival footage and sounds like professional gobblygook jargon, but that would be a crucial mistake since it frames our expectations of what the founder thought the Arboria Institute should be. Then the film starts in the present day and shows us the reality of his past ambitions. It seems as if there is an unbreachable chasm between the mission statement and the result of their work. After forty-seven minutes, the entire mood of the film shifts, and it feels like we’re briefly in the real world though we are still inside the facility. At this point, you should realize that the beginning of the film ties into this scene because we meet a character rewatching the archival footage obsessively, living in the past, whereas everyone else is trapped in the consequences of the past. For the next thirteen minutes, we finally get to see the visionary and his personified consequence interact complete with a startlingly surreal ten-minute flashback shot in a style reminiscent of George Lucas’ THX 1138 meets Kenneth Anger’s Lovecraft. During my first viewing, I watched this sequence two times because it explains everything! Then when you reemerge into the present Arboria Institute, your nagging suspicions transform into a sense of urgency as the trajectory of the narrative and the characters emerge and escape the confines of this artificial society into the real world, and we can finally understand who these characters really are. I think that the poster art gives away too much of the plot.
Cosmatos has an intense revulsion of men who use the veneer of either religion and/or science to rationalize their evil desires and abdicate their duty to care for others. He sees these institutions as temples to their narcissistic, massive egos—petty tyrants with godlike ambitions hungry for unwilling sacrifices to their aberrant desires while stripping those who refuse to ratify the validity of this artifice of their independence and autonomy. Even these institutions are insufficient to satisfy their thirst for domination over others because eventually someone will refuse to submit to their delusion that the world revolves around him. I think that the key to understanding this world is that everyone within it voluntarily exchanged the real world for this construct and thinks that it is normal and good except Elena, who has no objective experience with what is normal except through a television screen, but knows enough to believe that it is not the life within the institute. They are complicit in maintaining each other’s delusions so they cover up each other’s culpability regardless of how revolted they are at each other’s perversions.
The denouement of Beyond The Black Rainbow is brilliant because as Elena moves through the institute and further away from the black rainbow, she encounters the institute’s version of nature. It is still a startling contrast to the antiseptic, geometric life that she led, but still far from the reality of real trees and plants. It reminded me of the myth of Persephone and Hades. It is also brilliant because we get to compare the Institute’s ideal man alongside ordinary men, and we suddenly find ourselves in yet another genre of horror film at the eleventh hour—a slasher film.
I know that some critics complained about the lighting in Beyond The Black Rainbow, but I loved it, especially since one of my favorite artists is James Turrell albeit Turrell’s work feels ethereal, and this movie feels like a fever dream. I noticed that the soundtrack only plays when the scene is focusing on Elena, but other characters only get the sound of their environment. A minor criticism was the narrative reminded me of a subplot in Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is clearly still an influence, but now with a Kubrickian nightmarish aesthetic and tone and a Cronenberg body horror base.
While having lesser known actors play the characters probably helped audiences accept their strangeness without subconsciously bringing baggage from their other roles, an actor like Ben Mendelsohn in the starring role would have made a perfect Barry Nyle and Summer Glau or Brie Larson or a young Drew Barrymore would have delivered a textured, atmospheric performance as Elena. Please don’t think that I am criticizing Michael Rogers, the actor who did plays Dr. Nyle. He was giving me Equilibrium’s Christian Bale without the recognition. I loved his monotone delivery with a hint of sarcasm and disgust at everyone around him, including his former mentor.
If you don’t mind spoilers, the conclusion will have my theories about Beyond The Black Rainbow. I was brought up fundamentalist, and one fun theory about the Garden of Eden and the fruit of knowledge was that it was drugs. The CIA conducted a lot of drug experiments to see if they could succeed at mind control. The Reagan clip in the movie could point to the hypocrisy of advising citizens to just say no to drugs while sedating subjects without full consent and distributing drugs to the masses (Iran Contra Affair) for a Cold War better fought within ourselves. It is gaslighting on a national scale to create drug culture then criticize those who participate in it willing or not.
Unlike the CIA, the Arboria Institute was trying to create a secular Eden by fully transporting the mind and transforming the body to another dimension. They started by segregating themselves from the outside world and conducting experiments with zero oversight. They either discover an actual portal or with a combination of drugs and certain atmospheric exposures in a lab, a way to create a portal, to another level of consciousness. After an encounter with that dimension, human beings react in a complete physical and mental mutation that distorts love into lust and destruction like a vampire, but not supernatural. The founder and his love interest, Elena’s parents, had willing volunteers involved with the experiment, including Dr. Nyle, who is a victim and a perpetrator.
Once Dr. Nyle emerged from the “eye of god” or the black rainbow, he immediately killed Elena’s mom by biting her neck. Her dad, the founder, was once a visionary, but now is a strung out loser who has no sense of reality and has fully given his institute and daughter to the care of a murderer and a failed experiment while acting as if it was the opposite. If Elena’s dad had at least admitted that he failed, Dr. Nyle could have gotten some help, and there would be no further experiments, but instead he doubles down and immerses his baby girl in the viscous black goo, which gives her mental powers. For me, this moment is the most horrific part of the movie, and Dr. Arboria is the real monster.
If you notice, most men separate themselves from Elena with a glass, not just to protect themselves from her, but to protect her from them. They literally can’t control themselves around her. When we first see Dr. Nyle and Elena interacting, he clearly enjoys inflicting pain on her. His only “work” is basically to obsess about and torment her. After Dr. Nyle emerged, he has access to more strange knowledge than Dr. Arboria with fewer restraints because of his drug-induced madness. He created those weird machines that seem part human (baby) and part machine. Where did he get those babies from? Are they failed experiments like Elena? They are Dr. Nyle’s brain child just as Dr. Nyle and Elena are the Arborias’ brain children, but each successive generation is producing greater abominations. They act like Dr. Nyle’s surrogates and like mini-antiseptic vampires in the way that they subdue Elena, and he can vicariously live through them and their contact with her.
I think that a key to understanding Beyond The Black Rainbow is the moment when she tries to escape, and this weird guy confined to a glass cell who looks like Dr. Nyle when he takes off his appliances and isn’t trying to pass as a normal human being, is basically trying to grab her and clearly salivating over her. The nurse’s glimpse in the journal also explains that these failed experiments have a compulsive attraction to Elena. Dr. Nyle’s journal reveals that he wants to mate with Elena once she is old enough and possibly create a new species, but after we see Nyle’s idea of a good time with her mother, I don’t think that his intellectual goal to create a new race of human beings will happen. He will be too overwhelmed by the desire to rip her throat out. They just want to devour and dominate her.
This weird guy does not have even have the ability to pass. They lust after Elena because she has a purer connection to that world with none of their obviously negative side effects—possibly because she is too young to remember or maybe because she is a female, and we never witness another female as a subject to the experiment. She is pure power. They are addicted to that moment of annihilation, but can never achieve that same high, which why would you want to?!? The trip looks horrific. Without the glass, Elena weakens a bit in his presence as if there is a mental feedback similar to as if someone makes a call to a radio program with the radio still on. Once the glass separates them again, she is fully in control. She does not appear to have that reaction to Dr. Nyle because he is not as completely obliterated as the weird guy.
By the end of the movie, Dr. Nyle fully embraces that baser side of him and completely turns his back on his pre-experiment self. Elena has no brakes on her power so naturally she defeats him, but we have a super powerful person raised in a psychologically abusive environment whose only anchor to reality is television. Yikes! We saw that Dr. Nyle’s encounter with normal men ends in homicide. We don’t know how Elena will treat normal people. She killed her version of Nurse Ratchet, which good for her after a lifetime of sadistic treatment, but she killed her for trying to take a photograph from her. Who knows what triggers her? Just because she does not look distorted does not mean that she is a good character. I’m happy that Elena put a stop to the institute’s madness, but the experiment is not over. It is not a happy ending. The final scene was just as terrifying to me because it reminded me of Poltergeist meets Firestarter. What if Carol Ann was the poltergeist, but spit into our world instead of sucked out of it. Our world should not have any trace of the Institute’s influence even if it is innocent. Their dream is our nightmare.
