Phobos

Is "Fear" your ally or enemy? "It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure." - Joseph Campbell. "Phobos" means "Fear" in Greek.

The visuals are spellbinding, immersive and viscerally-palpable;...grabbing at the jugular (as Fear does to one)...becoming a powerful narrative design accessing the darkest labyrinths in the subject matter, experienced through the sensory sensibilities and sensitivities of Bonnie Ferguson's character. Although, I feel that she's dancing with an invisible partner, the character of 'Fear' itself. I'm entranced by the hypnotic reflections writing their own metaphysical alchemy on reflective surfaces...like the ceilings in the electronic walkways... turning the trick on the trickster...and reversing convention...allowing the ceiling to "ground" more in what it reflects about our fears and subconscious through its abstractions. Sometimes, it's within the absolute abstraction that we discover an understanding with piercing clarity. Exploring labyrinths of the mind by giving it a face through the settings of suffocating, encroaching corridors like a simulated lab maze the "subject" has to navigate through and within...it really did something to my own pulse rate and anxiety. Alex Proyas celebrates his masterful understanding, creation and implementation of a film language that "induces" feeling the story and its subject(s), rather than merely observing...incredible! The labyrinth of corridors, walkways, tunnels, underground train platforms collectively feel as if they give "a face" to a complex, multi-layered foliage, network, organic vascularity of your most invisible and pan-suffocating protagonist "Fear" itself. The B/W enhances the internal battle of the light and dark at the core of our being, and highlights the chiaroscuro that itself feels like a character...the embodiment of a suffocating fear, paranoia... The voice-overs of he who "conducts" the experimental observation...another race...an "outsider" of sorts(?) is a haunting character that forever presides through lateral time...a fascinating layer of consciousness that informs as he intrigues, questions rhetorically in an organic manner...and very subtly challenges your own thought processes. Its sound design induces an otherworldly seduction which identifies what is blind to us through the relativity of our sensory lexicon and cognizant process. Some perceive our cognizant process as a "controlled hallucination"...which is beautifully given reference to (through the DP work) when the "focus"/ understanding/ perception ..."blurs"...and what that may say about Fear itself as an agent in our lives...and what it does. Perhaps the "blur" is the clarity somehow...?

PHOBOS is a riveting exploration into 'Fear' as an evolutionary character within ourselves...within our DNA and its memory, being simultaneously a driving and regressive force, a life-carving and altering 'gravitational push and pull' within our internal cosmos. It's a cinematic awakening into how Fear proves to be both the Hope and Peril of our being. Following on the auteur director's signature, mind-blowing style, PHOBOS explores the hijacking of our cognizance and induced fear through mass culture and its diverse portals. The iconography is seductive as it is powerfully evocative: including iconic, cultural references 'Saturn Devouring His Son', 'Guernica' and Munch's 'The Scream' - to mention a few - in that visual slipstream of cutaway referentials that galvanize an arresting narrative design, hinting at how dots connect and weave a consciousness that induces "the prison of Fear". Even more haunting are the cuts in the end as she's walking... It makes us sense her fear...that she in fact fears the possibility/ies of her own quantum potential... Indeed the greatest fear is the fear within ourselves...the fear most relative to us...and no external "monster" could ever top that... The only thing to fear in the (in)human condition...is well...'Fear' itself. Alex Proyas weaves a narrative design through the marriage of image and sound, pace, settings, costume and makeup designs...in a spellbinding, seductive, haunting...and ultimately interrogative manner! Fear is the greatest ally the master puppeteer has to execute mass subjugation;...whoever owns the "arena"...owns the masses (ref: GLADIATOR)...