Altered States

Altered States is my second Ken Russell film, and I don’t know what I have been doing all this time. I have never seen anything quite like it, and it’s messy and difficult to assess and categorize, but here goes: there are many, many oppositions in Altered States. Human vs Animal. Self vs God. Science vs Religion. Love vs Hubris. Eventually, all of the binaries collapse into one. They are two halves, and one cannot exist without the other. Doctor Jessup (incredible performance from William Hurt, by the way) wants to regress, to devolve, to go backwards in an attempt to find his truer self, a truer existence. If we remove ego, civilization, and social conditioning, what’s left? It is authentic humanity, sure, but not in the utopian, metaphysical sense that he seeks. It’s sex, fear, hunger, and violence. Predation. It is a tale of ego death, obsession, annihilation, and consciousness. Visually? Breathtaking. The transformation? The scenes of gory, violent, spiraling hallucinations? Russell delivered.