A Scanner Darkly

A tale of drug-induced paranoia from the pen of Philip K Dick, the legendary sci-fi writer behind Blade Runner and Total Recall. In Los Angeles in the near future, a damaging and ultra-addictive new narcotic known only as “D” is blighting the city. In the war on drugs everyone is a suspect and undercover cop Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) is reluctantly forced to spy on his friends Jim Barris (Robert Downey Jr.), Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson), Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder) and Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane).Things take a darkly comic turn when Arctor is called upon to step up his surveillance to include himself and his journey into paranoia begins. A Scanner Darkly is a trippy ride and the movie is rendered all the more stylised and disorienting by an animation style called rotoscoping which draws over filmed elements to produce an ultra-realistic cartoon.