Also starring Woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr., and Winona Ryder, Richard Linklater’s striking, unsettling adaptation is a captivating movie, though not a particularly uplifting one.
Keanu Reeves plays Bob Arctor in this Philip K. Dick adaptation, an undercover agent in an alternate universe where the U.S. lost the war on drugs.
While the visuals are more commonly celebrated, Reeves’ dour performance helps to bring the full weight of this downer tale.
Both visually stunning and intellectually stimulating, A Scanner Darkly is a darkly dazzling rotoscope-animated science-fiction thriller, providing a beautifully realized and eventually hauntingly somber look into the mindset of its drug-addled characters in this unstable world.