Invisible forces exert power over us in our sleep. A mercenary named Ink, on a literal nightmare mission, captures the spirit of 8-year-old Emma in the dream world. To save her, the dream-givers marshal all their resources, focusing on saving the soul of Emma's tragically broken father.
01 Dec Ink (2009)
Paper on Ink
Gosh, is this good cinema. It has energy and imagination. It has internal self-reference: the storyteller in the thing has her audience as one of the characters, someone who appears in three persona unknown to each other. The way things are revealed and the timeline is shuffled is wonderful… the way they folded the perspectives into side by side realities in side by side worlds… the way the two warring dreamarmies are designed… the way the target is the ink.
The price they decided to pay was to put it all into the service of a profoundly syrupy confection of moral simplicity. family/child = good, money/career = bad. But one level higher it becomes cooly reversed. This is film, but the bad guys are the ones with the film presence. The saviours are a storyteller and a blind seer who never meet. The conflict is designed not to reflect real conflict, but something staged so that you can see.
It is an acceptable price. The storytelling is wonderful, just wonderful.
Posted in 2009
Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.
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