The best science fiction is premonitory without totally losing its bearing on reality; it stretches and simplifies human nature until it can be seen flying in a set formation, susceptible as a whole. Considering the threat present in Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly – corporate-sponsored drug addiction – the “7 years from now” tag seems almost like a formality (just google “fluoxetine” +”lawsuit,” and make sure you have the afternoon free). Further undoing any luxury of preemption is the way Linklater insists on continuity with his current universe of goof-offs: co-”D” (or Death) addicts James (Robert Downey Jr.), Bob (Keanu Reeves) and Ernie (Woody Harrelson) spend much of the time just fucking around in the wastes of suburbia.

But in the same way Before Sunset revealed the age-lines on its antecedent’s wispy forevers, A Scanner Darkly pushes easy drug-talk to its breaking point: Every Beckett-like circle-of-inquiry is carried by a parallel stream of either oblivion or descent. Only Reeves’ Bob Arctor manages to still linger on the junkie precipice. He plays a narcotics agent who gave up his family life, hoping to pursue the riotous uncertainty of addiction. But instead of rogue glamour on drip, he watched it calcify into the same static horizon. Linklater uses Reeves to his full meta-capacity, as a blank canvas, across which D plunders the reality of identity like a swarm of ants; in turn, the use-affliction of warring brain halves (the right overcompensating for a diminishing left) becomes an obvious metaphor for a man torn between two ways of living, each being made increasingly unavailable. By rotoscoping the film (i.e., digitally painting over live footage), yet minimising any visual flourishes, Linklater draws out the headache underlying this 100-minute trip. He also never reveals just what it is that D does to the user: Accent is shifted entirely onto the addiction-end of things, reconsidering use in terms of a capitalist economy, as a “produced need.” It’s through this power loop that the tendrils of a bureaucratic nightmare slowly gain footing. And with Arctor’s struggle waylaid in favour of a more free-spirited attack on the nation, the film savagely undoes the white-knuckle patriotism of ‘50s sci-fi. From now on, when the end comes, it’ll be at own our hands.—David Levinson