Cinema: The dark side of the soul

Keanu Reeves battles against himself in A Scanner Darkly while Christian Bale returns from war bent on destruction in Harsh Times. By Declan Burke

The tale of a vice cop getting sucked into drug addiction while working undercover isn't new, but A Scanner Darkly (16s), adapted from from Philip K Dick's novel, offers enough fresh angles to make it well worth-while. Set in California in the near future, when the lethally addictive Substance D (nicknamed 'death' by users) has become the prime target in the state's ongoing war on drugs. The film depicts a sci-fi dystopia in which people are so removed from reality that narcotics agent Fred (Keanu Reeves) can investigate his alter ego, drug dealer Bob Arctor, without ever connecting the two parts of his split personality.

The multiple perspectives are initially confusing, but what's even more disorientating – at first – is the method that director Richard Linklater employs to tell the tale, which is to 'paint' animation onto a normal live-action film. The impact is visually stunning, and soon becomes wholly believable. The actors – Reeves, Robert Downey Jnr, Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder – are immediately recognisable and far more life-like than normal animation would allow, but the net effect is to create a dislocation from reality that allows the audience to empathise with the despairing, claustrophobic paranoia of Philip K Dick's novel.

At this remove, the novel (published in 1977) appears prophetic, at least in the way the interminable and unwinnable war on drugs contributes to the meshing of Big Government and Big Business. Linklater maintains a Kafkaesque tone shot through with black humour of the stoner variety (and who better to play stoners than Reeves, Downey Jnr and Harrelson?), and in the process creates a worthy addition to the canon of movies based on Dick's novels and short stories (Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report).

There isn't a lot that's new about Harsh Times (16s) either: to all intents and purposes it's a Taxi Driver for the post-9/11 landscape. Ex-soldier Jim David (Christian Bale) returns from the Iraq war and finds he cannot live without the adrenaline thrill of confrontation and combat. With his old buddy Mike (Freddy Rodriguez) in tow, Jim sets off down a path that leads to a finale as horrific as it is inevitable.

It's a tragic set-up in the classical sense, in which the seeds of a man's downfall are intrinsic to his character. Writer/director David Ayres is deliberately ambiguous about whether or not Jim's sadistic streak is due to his experience of war – and there's a voyeuristic fascination to be had from watching Jim's gradual disintegration. Bale's performance raises this run-of-the-mill story to heights it really doesn't deserve: an actor who possesses the rare ability to disappear into character, Bale is equally convincing as Batman or a psychotic malcontent bent on self-destruction. Here, he combines a visceral intensity with an almost unbearable vulnerability, inviting the viewer to step inside the skin of a self-loathing monster. A Scanner Darkly ****

Harsh Times ****