We've stared at its cover for weeks; sat next to its poster in bus shelters; watched it come alive before every festival film. Now, having seen A Scanner Darkly, the inspiration behind this year's trump festival image is a little clearer. Granted, Richard Linklater's new rotoscoped film is anything but a still life; as if employing a layer of tracing paper over the surface, his posse of artists have taken their markers, scored thick black outlines, and filled in the rest of this Philip K. Dick colouring book. It's one dazed and confused filter, simultaneously numbing and sugar-coating the aimless reality of a group of slackers who, as addicts of the corporate-sponsored drug "Substance D", get to fuck around in a stained glass world of perpetual surveillance and 18 (or is that 9?) speed bikes.

Both stoners in real life, Woody Harrelson and Robert Downey Jr. threaten to outdo all with their manic delusional rants. Unlike Waking Life though, this is far less playful or doped from an animation point of view, committing to a strict graphic novel aesthetic without ever letting the nib stray beyond the lines. Blur your eyes (or remove your glasses) for a moment, and the screen image appears little more than regular live action footage – certainly less than hallucinogenic for a film predicated on getting high. But never mind. Most impressive in the visual stakes is the conception of the "scramble suit", described in Dick’s novella as “a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representations of various people: men and women, children, with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthin shroudlike membrane large enough to fit around an average human.” Worn by undercover narcotics agents, the suit’s looping projections number into seemingly the hundreds – the process of animating them just as boggling – making this by far the most tripped-out thing about the film.—Tim Wong