Director Ken Russell’s 1980 film Altered States offers a nice evolutionary flip: Scientist takes drugs, turns into caveman (and then into … I don’t know what that was …)
This deliciously over-the-top witch’s brew finds Russell, frequent explorer of the grotesque and the strange, the weird and hysterical (Tommy, The Devils, Gothic), venturing into occult strata of intellectual and genetic sub-consciousness. Altered States follows mad-monk-as-raging-scientist Eddie Jessup’s increasingly precarious and otherworldly investigations into altered states, via isolation tanks and potent hallucinogens.
William Hurt has a potent screen debut as Jessup, whose academic studies into schizophrenia led him to believe that patients’ delusional episodes are just as viable to their empirical reality as their supposedly sane ones. He projects this idea onto the notion of genetic memory – suspecting that our earlier evolutionary manifestations still lurk inside us as latent, limboid realities, which can be re-manifested.
Stumbling onto a peyote-esque psychotropic in Mexico – which, the shaman warns him, transports the user back to the dawn of being – Jessup proceeds to ride the drug into the void, with mind-shattering consequences as his body and consciousness get warped into various incarnations, from neanderthal to quasi-cellular thing, and back.
Essentially a 20th century take on the various alchemic and faustian legends, Altered States takes full advantage of its time: The characters still live in heady proximity to the age of free love and psychedelia, while Ken Russell exploits to the hilt then-current developments in special effects.
An entirely unique film, it moves self-consciously (and with the occasional reflexive snicker) through sci-fi, horror, drama, romance and farce, somehow sustaining uniformly great acting and dialogue while all hell erupts via some of the most impressive and unnerving visuals yet committed to celluloid.
[First published in Muse magazine.]
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