Hallucinogenic 80s Sci-Fi Thriller Will Expose You To An Entirely New Reality

Written by Robert Scocchi | Published 29 seconds ago

Sensory experiences are as old as time, and have been used as a means of achieving a higher sense of consciousness. Whether you’re an ardent fan of Tool’s music in your attempts to open your third eye (we get it, you love the polyrhythms and fat vocals), or you want to dabble in illicit substances that allow you to break free from your current state of reality to see the world from a different perspective, there’s definitely more than one way to skin a cat. Or in the case of the 1980s Changing countriesno cat is skinned, but rather a goat bleeds out after taking highly concentrated doses of primal flowers before lying down in a sensory deprivation tank that causes your mental and physical being to regress to a more primal iteration that modern science has no way of properly documenting.

Discussing mind over matter in the most profound way possible, Changing countries It’s a visual feast of unsettling images and such a trip in itself that you can watch this film sober and still feel like your gray matter is being jostled by outside forces. Or maybe you just need to stop eating so many spicy foods before you fall asleep on the couch. No matter how this film moves you, know that its content comes from the scariest place we know: our subconscious.

What could go wrong?

Changing countries He explains his point by forcefully imposing the concept of sensory regression on the viewer through vivid hallucinations that play the role of a kind of sleep paralysis fever dream from which you can’t quite wake up. When Columbia University psychopathologist Edward Jessup (William Hurt)’s study of individuals with schizophrenia suggests that altered states of consciousness are just as objectively real as those we experience in the physical world, he becomes obsessed with becoming a laboratory rat through risky human experiments involving hallucinogens and sensory deprivation.

Edward lives in this self-imposed state of existential hostility as a way to jump-start his research, which results in him consuming Edward’s work, which puts a huge strain on his relationship with his wife, Emily (Blair Brown), who has also dedicated her life to her research but believes he is pushing his research too far.

Searching for his next solution in the name of science, Edward continues to put himself under pressure and document his findings, much to the concern of his colleagues, Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban) and Mason Parrish (Charles Hyde). Having reason to believe that his mental experiences have effected a profound transformation in his physical being, Edward steps forward until he can prove his hypothesis with some level of concreteness.

His consciousness and subconscious contain amounts, and Emily believes he may actually be on the brink of completely unexplored psychological territory, but his behavior becomes increasingly erratic as he continues to lose himself in action. He is either a man driven mad by too many experimental doses of highly concentrated hallucinogens, or his mind has gone to such an incomprehensible place that he simply does not yet know how to express his findings.

Stop at the philosophy, and keep the brain melting

He leans heavily into his visual story, Changing countries It is an assault on the senses in the best way. Whenever Edward goes down, we see and hear what he’s doing, and it’s enough to make you want to close your eyes and plug your ears because even seeing his second hand coming apart makes you want to retreat to a cold, dark, quiet room to center yourself after being exposed to such a high level of rapid and varied madness. In the empty silence that exists between these discordant passages, we witness a clear man trying to understand what he experienced on the other side.

If you don’t end up swallowing your tongue while experiencing the sudden madness that explodes from your screen and melts your face, you’ll wonder if that’s why the human brain is such a dangerous place to live as you attempt to tap into some ancient and incomprehensible level of knowledge that could destroy the fabric of reality as we know it if left unchecked. If you’re not so lucky, you can always chew on your wallet until the dust settles and reality snaps back into place as if it was all just a bad dream.

Changing countries He gushes over Toby.