Ink

Envision a world where, while you sleep, two forces battle for your soul.  On the side of good are the Storytellers, they give you the good dreams that nurture your soul.  On the other side are the Incubi, these facades of vanity wither you soul with dark dreams.  This is the world created in Ink, a surrealistic jig-saw puzzle that starts, the way most puzzles do, as a jumbled pile of confusing mess on the floor and ends without some of the pieces fitting completely, and you’re not really sure what the complete picture is, but you find yourself accepting the end product as a whole.  Ink is at times horribly paced, convoluted, and awkward, but two words that describe this film the best is beautiful and original.  I’ve never seen anything quite like Ink, but some of the images are so iconic I don’t think I’ll forget them anytime soon.

SPOILERS LIE AHEAD.  YE BE WARY.

The first thirty minutes of this movie pissed me off.  If you walked into the living room anywhere in that first section of the movie and asked me what the movie was about I could only stare at you blankly.  I’m all for mystery in a movie.  I love when you let me figure things out for myself, but at some point I need something to grasp onto or I’m just going to get lost.  That’s what happened in this movie, of course, if I would’ve read a synopsis of Ink before watching I would’ve had a better time, but not knowing anything going in got frustrating.   First you have the main character, John, get into a car accident and then for the next twenty to thirty minutes nobody says anything about it, he isn’t injured in the next scene, nothing  informs you that was in the future/past I was just stuck thinking, “wasn’t that guy in an accident?  What happened with that?”  Then these strange people appear out of balls of light and start breaking into peoples’ houses, “Are these robbers from the future?”  This goes on for quite a while, but eventually there are enough clues to start fitting the pieces together, and the movie becomes rewarding.

Ink’s best quality is the iconic imagery and visual storytelling on such a small budget.  As far as I know this film was made on $250,000, which sounds like a lot, but even low end film productions are in the tens of millions.  To pull off this surrealistic, mostly dream, world for literally a fraction of a low-end budget is a point to applaud on.  I don’t think I will ever forget the dramatic figure of Ink, the title character, with his large robe, chains, tiny bongos and especially his bad ass figure when he’s fighting with his two knives.  He is an unbelievably cool visual character.  I also loved the Incubi.  Their tall dark figures dwarfed by the screens they wear over their faces upon which are projected false smiles and trusting faces.  They are visually frightening and yet beautiful in their own demonic way.  Don’t even get me started with the visual storytelling of this movie.  Sure, the first thirty minutes were difficult to understand, as I previously mentioned, but there are literally whole segments of this movie that tell a story with no dialogue.  That is difficult to do, I know.  Using dialogue as a crutch is something I battle with on a daily basis in my writing and this movie made it look easy.  I’ll definitely be looking here for some inspiration on the subject.

Now that I’m done gushing, I do have some problems with the movie.  The editing was off-putting for me.  Some scenes that I felt would work better with less editing and longer shots were cut into ribbons with skipping from angle to angle.  I understand you don’t want one angle for too long or the audience will get bored, but sometimes you have to let a scene breath.  I feel like they might have made these choices to be purposefully different and push the boundaries, which I like as an attitude, but I also believe those boundaries serve a purpose.  When I watch a movie I want to be sucked into a different world.  I want to forget that I’m sitting in a dark room.  When you make crazy editing decisions, or weird camera angles when they aren’t justified I get pulled out of the story and am reminded where I am and what I’m doing.  That, to me, is death of a movie.  This same reason is why I don’t watch very many surrealistic movies, because I don’t want to be reminded that I’m watching a movie I just want to be engrossed in a story.  In my mind, you do a good job when you go unnoticed in the first viewing.  

Another problem I had was dialogue.  There were more awkward lines than you could shake a shaved cat at.  The ongoing dialogue that annoyed me the most was the talk of Emma, the little girl that is kidnapped by Ink, being a lioness.  I get it, Liev was attempting to boost her confidence, but when Emma roars at people and they react with fright I laugh.  This girl is fifty pounds soaking wet and her roar isn’t that impressive.  And in the end, when she’s told she’s a true lioness and no one can harm her, the leader of the Incubi picks her up and sets her in a tub, where I can only assume she will be sacrificed, and she doesn’t put up a fight.  She roars at him and he flinches for a moment, then picks her up without difficulty.  Where did her fight go?  Do lionesses always let themselves be man-handled?  No.  That didn’t work for me.

Even with all of Ink’s flaws I still find myself liking the film.  I marginally liked it when the credits rolled, but the more I think about it, the more I like it.  That doesn’t excuse the needlessly convoluted ending, which I have found justifications for online but I still can’t make logical sense of it, but I’m willing to look past that and give Ink a B-.