Director/screenwriter Richard Linklater based this rotoscope animated sci-fi thriller film on Philip K. Dick's novel.

Seven years from now in Anaheim, California, Bob Arctor (Keanu Reeves) and three friends - Jim Barris (Robert Downey Jr), Ernie Luckman (Woody Harrelson), and Charles Freck (Rory Cochrane) - hang out together and do drugs. According to Barris, Charles suffers from "garden-variety psychosis." Bob's girlfriend Donna Hawthorne (Wynona Ryder) won't let Bob touch her, claiming she's heavy into coke and can't bear to be touched.

A fifth of the population has become addicted to Substance D, a narcotic that separates the functions of the brain's hemispheres. The authorities have created New Path and a pervasive holographic-scanning system to monitor the city's inhabitants in an effort to combat the plague.

Bob is also an undercover narcotics agent named Fred who wears a scramble suit, which continuously shape-shifts the identity of the person wearing it, making him appear as everyman; a team of psychologists gives Fred batteries of tests to observe behavioral changes related to his use of Substance D. He is assigned to watch Arctor's house (his superior Hank doesn't know Fred's actual identity) and its inhabitants.

Barris acts like an informant, telling the authorities (in Fred's presence) that Arctor and his pals are a terrorist drug organization. Bob tries to protect the others from Barris, assuming Barris is after him.

Ernie nearly dies in full view of Barris, who makes little effort to offer assistance. When Charles attempts suicide, he experiences a hallucination of The Sins of Freck with an alien reading from a list of his bad deeds for eternity.

When the split-brain phenomenon of Substance D overwhelms Bob/Fred's ability to function, Donna takes him to the New-Path Recovery Center for detoxification where he, as Bruce, eventually gets transferred to a farm where blue flowers grow among the corn stocks. Donna as Audrey tells her fellow conspirator Mike her regrets that Bruce had to be used without volunteering for the mission to get inside the organization in order to possibly discover "the process hidden below our reality."

(A bonus feature on the DVD provides an enlightening demonstration of the rotoscope-animation process.)

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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