A Scanner Darkly

A Scanner Darkly

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jnr, Winona Ryder, Woody Harrelson

Director: Richard Linklater

The film: Last year, the original Slacker traded in his wistfulness and apathy for huge doses of angst, and gave shape to the sharp social critique that's been submerged within his work all along. On the strength of the two films he made last year, Richard Linklater has proved himself to be Dazed and Confused no more. Neither is he content to express his displeasure about American society merely through characters that exhibit passive non-compliance to mainstream conventions (a thread that underlines his films from SubUrbia to School of Rock).

His other film of last year, Fast Food Nation - inspired by Eric Schlosser's censure of the American meat-packing and fast food industries - is the more directly political. A Scanner Darkly, however, is as engaging in its reproach of social and political developments in modern-day America, but in a more indirect way.

The screen version of Philip K. Dick's sci-fi novel of the same name, A Scanner Darkly portrays a nation where drugs (especially something called Substance D, or simply 'Death') have become everyday fare. The government responds by turning the country into a police state, with infiltrators charged with tracking down the narcotic insurgents.