A Scanner Darkly

A Scanner Darkly takes a peek into a future where the United States has lost the war on drugs. In this world of drugs and crime, one undercover cop in suburban Orange County, California is reluctantly forced into spying on his friends to try and uncover some of the secrets behind the drug world.

This film, inspired by the novel by Philip K. Dick about his own life experiences, tells a cautionary tale of drug use and one mans paranoid journey into the absurd, where loyalties are called into question and identities are impossible to decode.

A Scanner Darkly has been described as a graphic novel come to life, as it uses live action photography overlaid with an advanced animation process called interpolated rotoscoping. This same film technology was first implemented in Richard Linklater’s 2001 film Waking Life. The cinematography method helps to create a haunting, highly stylized vision of the future.

The film stars Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder, Rory Cochrane and is scheduled for release sometime in July 2006.