Film Forum

U.S., 1980
Directed by Ken Russell
With William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban, Charles Haid, Thaao Penghlis, Drew Barrymore
Based on the novel by Paddy Chayefsky
Approx. 103 mins. 35mm.

“William Hurt plays a Harvard scientist named Jessup who takes such an experiment one step further, by ingesting a drug made from the sacred hallucinatory mushrooms of a primitive tribe. The strange thing about these mushrooms, Hurt observes in an easily missed line of dialogue in the movie, is that they give everyone who takes them the same hallucinatory vision. Perhaps it is our cellular memory of creation: There is chaos, and then a ball of light, and then the light turns into a crack, and the crack opens onto Nothing, and that is all there was and all there will be, except for life, which has its only existence in the mind.” – Roger Ebert

Presented with support from the Ada Katz Fund for Literature in Film

Reviews

“It opens at fever pitch and then starts soaring — into genetic fantasy, into a precognitive dream of delirium and delight.”
 – Richard Corliss, TIME

“There isn't a lucid moment in it (and much of the dialogue is rendered unintelligible by Russell's subversive direction), but it has dash, style, and good looks, as well as the funniest curtain line since SOME LIKE IT HOT.”
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

“[Director] Russell's noisily grandiose swipe at psychedelia embellishes what is no more than the cosily familiar story of the obsessive Scientist Who Goes Too Far and Unwittingly Unleashes, etc.”
– Time Out