Originally published in Cinema Knife Fight, August 18, 2010
This film might not appeal to everyone. It can be a bit of a mind-bender at times. If you’re the type of audience who needs to understand exactly what is going on when it’s happening, and not wait and trust that, as the story unfolds, you’ll be shown the light, so to speak, you might find this booger frustrating at times.
Otherwise – the only way to view INK is to sit back and trust that director and writer Jamin Winans (11:59, 2005) will explain it all, in the story’s own time. And he does. Of course, time in this film is all relative.
INK opens with John (Christopher Soren Kelly) shouting “F–k! F–k! F–k!” at his steering wheel. I recommended this film to my friend who thought she might have gotten the wrong movie based on these opening few seconds, but throughout the movie, INK alternates between loud action and slow, silent calm. Anyway, a moment later, John is distracted by something on the side of the road, and we get a favored recent staple of moviemaking, the sudden car smashing into the driver’s window. Jolts you, even though we’ve seen this a hundred times by now. We’re suddenly brought to a dreamlike, grassy area by the railroad tracks, where John’s young daughter Emma (the amazingly-talented Quinn Hunchar) wants so much for him to play make-believe and save her from the imaginary monster. He whines and tries to get out of it, finally relents, plays along, then…
Well, then INK gets nice and weird and wonderful and amazing to watch until the end. After the opening, we jump back in time. A quiet suburban neighborhood, various people (including John) going to sleep. Outside, in a scene reminiscent of the opening to the first Harry Potter novel, people flash silently into existence along the street. All of them late twenty something, uber-cool and beautiful. They sneak into people’s houses and give them happy dreams, “shaping souls through their subconscious dreams,” as the tagline reads (give or take). Are these people angels? It’s never stated, though it is implied they are, a modern take on them at least. They’re called Storytellers, but they do more than just give dreams. Young Emma is playing with her toys, making up stories while being watched with amusement by an angel named Allel (Jennifer Batter). (I’ll call them “angels” because there’s less letters and I have an issue with the other label as I’ll explain later.) Emma lives with her grandparents and not her father. Important for later.
There are dark creatures that also come out at night called Incubi (replace with “demons” if you’d like). The Incubi give bad dreams to everyone, shape people’s lives in a negative way, and are some of the creepiest characters I’ve met on film. Dressed in black leather, they see everything through glass panels mounted in front of them that distort their demonic smiles.- smiles which are constant and quite frightening. I’d rather have a clown standing at the foot of my bed than one of these guys. And one of them is standing at the foot of John’s bed. One of them is with John all the time, in fact, because like the angels, these creatures sometimes stalk us in while we’re awake.
Once we’ve been given a view into the “normal” goings-on between these two forces, enter a new creature: hooded, dressed in long tattered rags with a long nose like the Child Catcher from CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG (1968), he creeps into young Emma’s room and touches her forehead to draw out her spirit. He grabs her and runs, but Allel isn’t far away. She puts out the alarm and here we see the other side of the angels – they’re fighters, constantly battling the Incubi. This new creature, named Ink, is so strong he fights off Allel and three others before making his escape, stepping through a portal summoned via small bongo drums hanging from his clothes. No, seriously.
The rest of the story alternates between three worlds. Ours: the waking, scattershot sensory-overloaded one; the angels’: a quiet, peaceful world bathed in yellow-filtered light, an implied heaven; and the world of the Incubi, into which Ink steals away the girl. This is hell I assume, a dirty, complex world which sometimes looks like our own, sometimes a labyrinth of passages and creepy rooms through which Ink drags Emma on his way to deliver her soul to the head demon in exchange for becoming an Incubus himself. The center of the story is a battle for the girl’s soul, and her father’s, John being the key to the survival of Emma’ physical body as it lies dying in the hospital. Trouble is, John has effectively removed himself from her life, because of drugs, alcohol, workaholism, and the death of his wife.
OK, I’ll stop a moment and say this: one cannot describe the plot of this film without making it sound a wee bit lame. Trust me on this, it’s not. I’ve covered the basic premise, though, so let’s leave that alone and talk about how the film worked, what struck me most.
Visually, INK is a beautiful film. Sometimes literally, something only aesthetically since some of the locations are claustrophobic and dirty. All, extremely well-conceived. The editing was static and chaotic – this is for artistic reasons, mostly: when the two worlds blend, when time itself plays tricks throughout the movie, as negative images are planted into John’s head by the Incubus who follows him around, eating at his mind. It all works to make each world both real and unreal. Be warned, however: some scenes could be considered a threat to anyone with epilepsy. The biggest example are the fight scenes between the angels and Incubi, which are of the Paul Greengrass (BOURNE SUPREMACY, 2004), let’s take a bunch of frames out to make the action choppy and thus more intense variety. I don’t like that kind. The fights were cool, though I could have had less of the staccato editing. Started to give me a headache after a while. See, there was something I didn’t like about the movie.
And one other complaint: two things in the script that seemed, I don’t know, out of place? The label of Storytellers for the angels. Seriously, this is one of the hippest genre movies to come out since DONNIE DARKO (2001), so you’d think they’d have come up with a less fairytale-esque word for these otherworldly dudes and dudettes. Like “Incubus” – now that’s cool… man.
One of the better angel characters, aside from the above-mentioned Allel and the angelic (literally) Liev (Jessica Duffy), is a blind guy named Jacob (Jeremy Make). He wears X’s of black electrical tape over his eyes – whether this makes him blind or not isn’t stated, but the point is he’s a tracker, finding whatever is required using both his biting wit and an inner sense of rhythm, which comes out as a constant, OCD counting (1… 2… 3… 4…). He’s referred to as a Pathfinder, and I really don’t know why this title bothers me, why it sounds out of place, but it does. Probably for the same reasons as above.
One of the best scenes is when blind Jacob activates a bizarre little contraption to help him manipulate events in our world (another exclusive talent he has) in order to… well, watch the movie. It’s a cool scene, and pivotal. And, here is where the musical score for INK shines most.
The score, composed by writer/director Winans, is minimalist and perfect for this film. I’m listening to it now, in fact – I don’t think a move has driven me to buy the soundtrack since, maybe, ONCE (2006). Some people don’t like music playing constantly throughout a film, but in this case it’s not overbearing – instead adds to the dreamlike, emotional quality of the film. The music is as critical to this film as the effects or the acting or the editing. Everything works so well together it makes it hard to talk about one without how it affects, and is affected by, the other. Heaven’s music is soft, ethereal, Hell’s music is sharper,INCEPTION-ish… sorry, INCEPTION(2010)-ish…. When Jacob sets a series of events into play, his vocal counting blends more and more with the music until at one point he is in the street (invisible to us mortals) waving his arms like a conductor. As if the angel characters can hear the score of the film along with us.
I dare to you to recognize any of the actors in INK (unless you’ve seen Winan’s previous film, 11:59, which I have not). You would think that with so many newcomers there would be performance quality all over the chart. There’s not. Granted, with the exception of Allel, Jacob and Liev, and John and Emma, no other character says a whole lot. The acting was smooth and natural – even when things got supernatural, they came across pretty grounded. You liked them. That’s key for any movie or book. It helped that everyone playing an angel was extremely very pretty and/or handsome. The Incubi, on the other hand, came in all shapes and sizes, creepy smiles distorted through glass panels – ugly, in so many ways. Ink himself is a masterpiece of makeup, part Child Catcher, part Lord Voldemort, who slowly becomes somewhat of a sympathetic character as the story progresses and we learn he’s got his own, weighty issues to deal with. You learn to hate him a little less as the film goes on.
By the way, just so it’s said: CHITTY CHITTY BANG BANG is one of the all-time worst movies ever to be forced upon the mind of a viewer. Just because I made reference to it twice, do not dare think otherwise. Terrible, terrible movie. Anyway….
The spiritual aspects of INK, forces battling each other over the souls of the living, appealed to me. Maybe as a Christian I read more into it than Winans intended, but I don’t think so. Nor do I think you need to be of a religious bent to enjoy this movie. It rocks on so many levels. The ending came at just the right time in the movie, too, just enough resolution that your mind wasn’t reeling about what you’d seen, as for instance when the credits for DONNIE DARKO rolled in. But like that movie, INK will stay with you for a long time.
I give INK my first ever: 5 Hip, Cool Angels out of 5 rating. Your mileage may vary, but if you find yourself not liking at least many parts of this movie, for many reasons, you might have had your soul stolen by a scary Incubus. Or a clown. Pray it’s a clown.