Alex Proyas  

US 
 

With its built-in sense of mystery, psychological complexity and moral ambiguity, amnesia is a staple of noir stories. Cornell Woolrich used the device so many times the condition seemed almost congenital. Until the unexpected success of 'LA Confidential' last year, film noir – or at least neo-noir  – had gone from American cinema's most subversive genre to just another retro fashion statement, a rather decadent pastiche brand comprising shadowy lighting, the hard-boiled voice-over, a femme fatale and a circuitous suspense narrative – Venetian blinds and dirty raincoat optional. 

The surprise is, Dark City sidesteps this particular aesthetic deadend. In fact, it's not a film noir at all. When Murdoch steps into the city streets, he has no idea of the odds he's up against. Not only is he wanted for questioning about more than one murder, but his own actions are the subject of a far wider experiment. If Murdoch's world has been turned upside down, that's only the half of it. The entire city is in a constant state of flux. Buildings morph, skyscrapers shoot up, boundaries contract, the sun never rises – and no-one notices. The populace is trapped in a perpetual, universal amnesia... they're the playthings not of fate, but of an alien species – the Strangers – capable of making time stand still and bent on plumbing the mysteries of the human soul. 

An original story by Australian director Alex Proyas (The Crow) Dark City is actually closer to the worlds of Ray Bradbury and Philip K Dick than Raymond Chandler and Philip Marlowe. Proyas, who collaborated first with Lem Dobbs (Kafka) and then David Goyer (The Crow 2) on the screenplay, has fashioned a post-modern sci-fi film that works both as an existential nightmare and as a jaw-dropping spectacular. A genre buff, Proyas rightly points out that in terms of art direction, his film opts for an ominous emptiness that's the opposite of Ridley Scott's detailed Blade Runner, yet comparisons are inevitable: both pictures hinge on the notion of artificial memories and both draw on early 20th century urban design (notably Fritz Lang's film Metropolis – itself inspired by New York City) and noir archetypes to create a quasi-recognisable modern universe, an alternate reality in which we may feel at home, but which may be less 'real' than we suppose. 

William Hurt is detective Bumstead, for example, complete with fedora and raincoat; while Murdoch's wife, Emma, is played by Jennifer Connelly, something of a latter-day noir icon after her roles in Once Upon a Time in America, The Hot Spot and Mullholland Falls. 

Then again, the presence of Ian Richardson as the mind-altering Mr Book reminds us of perhaps an even more apt comparison, Terry Gilliam's paranoid fantasy, Brazil. Murdoch himself is played by the much-fancied British actor Rufus Sewell, long tipped for stardom on the back of his performances in the BBC's Middlemarch and Cold Comfort Farm, while Kiefer Sutherland and Richard O'Brien contribute to the prevailing atmosphere of barely suppressed pulp hysteria. 

While Proyas insists that he based the story on dreams dating back to his childhood ("while I was asleep, dark figures would come into my bedroom and rearrange things") and that he had begun working on it prior to his first American film, The Crow, it's tempting to speculate how the experience of shooting that movie around the tragic death of star Brandon Lee informs the new film's insistence on the artifice of all things, our subjective and imperfect conception of the material world and the importance of remembering. Certainly, there's no question that Dark City is an infinitely more complex and rewarding film.  Tom Charity