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A Scanner Darkly | 2006 | R | - 7.6.8

Keanu Reeves stars in Richard Linklater's rotoscoping animated take on Philip K. Dick's story about a future world where the majority of the world's population is addicted to a drug that slowly destroys minds and splits personalities. Also with Mitch Baker, Robert Downey Jr., Winona Ryder and Woody Harrelson. [1:50]

SEX/NUDITY 7 - We see a fast forwarded recording of a man and a woman having sex in many different positions, and we hear them moaning (we see that they are nude but there is no evident detail).
 A man and a woman go to a man's apartment, she lies on his bed, they kiss, she unbuckles his pants and they wake up in bed together later (it is implied that they have had sex); he is bare-chested and she is nude to the waist (her bare breasts are shown).
 A man imagines a waitress taking off her dress and revealing her bare breasts, which we see. A woman wears a low-cut top that reveals cleavage. A man is nude while bathing himself and his dog (we see his bare chest and abdomen to the hip). A man is shown bare-chested when he wakes up in bed.
 A man tells a woman that he wants to hug her, and she says she doesn't like being groped. A man talks about self-stimulation. Two men talk about another man never having sex with his girlfriend and her lack of sexual arousal because she does so many drugs. A man is frustrated and talks about not having had sex in a long time.
 A man accidentally falls on top of a woman on a sofa and pushes her back, and she struggles and gets out from under him. A man and a woman snuggle on a sofa.

VIOLENCE/GORE 6 - A man imagines a police officer cocking his gun, putting the man in handcuffs, holding the gun to the man's head and firing (we see his head separate from his body and he is left with a bloody cavity in his neck).
 A man chokes on food, struggles to breathe, tries to give himself the Heimlich maneuver, throws himself on the back of a chair, and falls to the floor motionless while another man watches; he then vomits, gags and coughs (we see goo).
 A man hits his head on a cabinet and we see blood on his hand after he touches his head. A hallucinating man scratches his head violently while bugs crawl all over him; he showers and continues to scratch frantically, the bugs continue to crawl over him, and he sprays himself with bug spray.
 A man imagines two men morphing into large bugs. A man crushes a fly on the dashboard of a car and we see the smudge of its remains. A man bathes himself and his dog when he sees bugs crawling on them both.
 Two men threaten each other with fighting: they argue, one man finds a hammer, the other a stone and they swing at each other briefly. Two men wrestle on a sofa. A man is zapped with a taser by police. A man shoots a gun in the air after pointing it at two other men and then at his own head. A man with a gun walks through a house suspecting that someone is there.
 A man makes a remark about someone cutting off a part of the male anatomy. We hear that a man may have suffered damage to one of the hemispheres of his brain.
 A man drinks wine and takes pills, trying to commit suicide. We see a list of names of people who either died or became very ill from abuse of a drug.
 A man with many eyes covering his face and head speaks to a man and reads him a list of all of the mistakes he made in his life (we hear that he will be doing this for eternity). The gas pedal of a car sticks, and the car rushes through traffic before slowing down to a stop.
 A man vomits -- we see goo and hear him gag.

LANGUAGE 8 - 31 F-words and its derivatives, 7 sexual references, 1 obscene hand gesture, 20 scatological terms, 2 anatomical terms, 13 mild obscenities, name-calling (loser), 10 religious exclamations.

SUBSTANCE USE - A man rolls a marijuana cigarette, a marijuana cigarette is found in an ashtray, and a man says that he can make cocaine by spraying something into a balloon and chilling it, and we hear that a man does "meth." A man drinks wine and takes pills trying to commit suicide and a man and a woman act inebriated. People are shown taking pills in several scenes. A man smokes cigarettes in several scenes.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Drug abuse, terrorism, addiction, retribution, isolation, loneliness, addictive behavior, detox, vengeance, existence.

MESSAGE - Drugs cause paranoia, and worse. Government surveillance brings about the erosion of individual privacy.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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