8/10/98
Our hero wakes up in a bathtub in a hotel room. There's a dead hooker on the bed. He remembers nothing. The phone rings, and a crazed voice on the other end warns him "get out...they're coming to kill you...no time to explain." The chase is on.
But this is not your basic cheesy amnisiac murder mystery. This dark city, where everyone can't quite remember the last time they saw daylight and can't quite remember how to get to Shell Beach, is a profoundly grand psychological experiment. Ancient beings are studying humans by injecting them with new memories, rearranging buildings with telekenisis, and restarting the experiment promptly at every midnight.
Eventually our hero discovers he has acquired his captors' power of telekenisis, learns the truth of his fake life and fake world, and struggles to a grand showdown to free his fellow subjects and reclaim his injected memory of love.
The style resembles the extra-dark and extra-gritty images of "Brazil", "12 Monkeys" and "Delecatessen". Kudos to the film editor, who had the nightmare job of splicing together the constantly high rate of scene cuts which drives the film fast and hard. Everything is brilliantly overdone.
Excellent, wierd.
CTD 9/15/98