A Scanner Darkly (2006) ***1/2

As a film (I have not read the Philip K. Dick novel on which it is based ) A Scanner Darkly (2006) is a tonally uneven but always engaging, hallucinatory, existential, dystopian portrait of drug users and police surveillance. I am a big fan of rotoscope animation, a painstaking and not often used technique, and while I wasn't head over heels for every scene in Scanner, it certainly has a unique, at times suitably disorienting look (given the subject matter), which I can appreciate. Richard Linklater does a solid job directing but I can't help but wonder what kind of film we would have got had Terry Gilliam directed, as he apparently wanted to in the early 90s (it's definitely more in his wheelhouse).