Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Undone


 My wife and I recently watched the Amazon Prime series "Undone". It uses rotoscope-style animation over live action to create an enthralling and sometimes super-trippy visual style.



The animated approach is reminiscent of one of my favorite movies "Waking Life" and another crazy movie based on the book by Philip K. Dick, "A Scanner Darkly".

The story follows Alma (played by Rosa Salazar), a woman who gets into a car crash & experiences a major shift in consciousness after coming out of a coma. Besides seeing and interacting with her dead father, she starts to have altered perceptions of time and space.

The lingering question throughout the series is whether Alma is feeling the effects of brain injury and perhaps schizophrenia inherited from her grandmother, or whether she has unlocked special abilities - as her father's spirit insists.

Her father claims that she has the abilities of a shaman to transcend the physical world, and he tries to recruit he to help him discover the circumstances behind his mysterious death.

There are a lot of interesting themes explored in this show, including shamanism, the nature of reality and the mind, social behaviors, the relativistic properties of time, and spirituality. All these concepts are blended into an engaging story that makes us question what is real... even here in the "real" world.

The final episode ended suddenly with insinuation of something significant happening, but without a clear resolution, a la "The Sopranos" which was a bit to abrupt for my liking. I wouldn't mind an ambiguous ending, but I felt like something a bit more interesting could have been explored, to match the depth of the series as a whole.

Overall it was enjoyable and intriguing, and I would recommend it for anyone interested by my description. At first, my wife flat-out said she didn't want to watch it, but after seeing a few episodes on my own I dragged her into it. She ended up really liking it since she is also interested in all the topics I mentioned.

I am pretty picky about what I choose to watch, and this was just the right mix of cool visual effects, thought-provoking ideas, engaging cast members, and all around excellent production. Definitely worth checking out.

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