The hallucinogenic sci-fi thriller from the 1980s takes you to a whole new reality
Author: Robert Skuch Published
Sensory experiments have been used since ancient times as a means to achieve higher consciousness. Whether you’re an avid fan of Tool music trying to pry open your third eye (we get it, you love polyrhythms and rich riffs), or you’re into illicit substances that take you out of your current state of reality and see the world from a different perspective, there’s definitely more than one way to skin a cat. Or, take the 1980s change stateNo cats were skinned, but rather goats were bled after ingesting high concentrations of the original flowers and then lay in sensory deprivation pools, which returns your mind and body to a more primitive iteration that modern science cannot properly document.
Debate mind and matter in the most visceral way, change state It’s a visual feast filled with unsettling imagery that’s a trip in itself, and you can watch this film sober and still feel like your gray matter has been disturbed by outside forces. Or maybe you just need to stop eating so much spicy food before dozing off on the couch. No matter how this movie ends up triggering you, just know that its content comes from the scariest place we know: our subconscious.
What problems might arise?
change state It gets its point across by actively forcing the concept of sensory return on the audience through vivid hallucinations that act like a sleep paralysis fever dream from which you can’t quite wake up. When Columbia University psychopathologist Edward Jessup (William Hurt)’s research on schizophrenia patients shows that altered states of consciousness are as objectively real as those experienced in the real world, he is hell-bent on becoming a lab rat through dangerous human experiments involving hallucinogens and sensory deprivation.
Edward lives in this self-inflicted state of existential hostility as a means to his research breakthroughs, and his work consumes him, which puts considerable strain on his relationship with his wife Emily (Blair Brown), who has also dedicated her life to her research but thinks he’s taken it a little too far.
In search of the next solution in the name of science, Edward continues to invest and document his findings, which attracts the attention of his colleagues Arthur Rosenberg (Bob Balaban) and Mason Parrish (Charles Hyde). Edward had reason to believe that his psychological experiments had affected a profound transformation in his physical existence, and so he moved forward so that he could tangibly prove his hypothesis to some extent.
His conscious and subconscious mind contains vast implications, and Emily believes he may actually be on the verge of breaking ground in completely unexplored psychological territory, but as he continues to lose himself in his work, his behavior becomes increasingly erratic. Either he was a man deranged from an experimental overdose of high concentrations of hallucinogens, or his mind had gone to such an incomprehensible place that he simply had no idea how to articulate his findings.
Stop and find philosophy, stay and let your brain melt
relies heavily on visual storytelling, change state It’s an assault on the senses in the best possible way. Whenever Edward gets into trouble, we see and hear things he does that are enough to make you want to close your eyes and plug your ears, because even witnessing his used-car debacle makes you want to retreat into a cold, dark, quiet room to center yourself after experiencing such a high level of rapid, kaleidoscopic madness. In the empty calm found between these dissonant fragments, we witness a sane man trying to make sense of what he is experiencing on the other side.
If you don’t end up swallowing your tongue while confronting the shocking madness that erupts on the screen and melts your face, you’ll wonder if this is why the human brain is such a dangerous place to live while trying to tap into some ancient, incomprehensible level of knowledge that, if left unchecked, could destroy the fabric of reality as we know it. If you’re not that lucky, you can always bite the bullet until the dust settles and reality returns, as if this was all just some kind of bad dream.
change state Now playing on Tubi.
