Altered States (1980) — Ken Russell’s fever dream of a film, where science fiction, horror, and the kind of intellectual pretense that could give a professor a hernia collide in a spectacular mess. Picture this: a man floats in a tank, stares at his own consciousness, and gradually turns into everything from a Neanderthal to a puddle of primordial goo, and you’ll start to get the idea.
William Hurt plays Edward “let’s-see-what-happens-when-I-mess-with-evolution” Jessup with the kind of earnest gravitas that makes you wonder if he actually read the script or just had a psychic vision of the word “science” and ran with it. His transformation scenes, which go from sweaty existential terror to him smacking around a zoo as a proto-human, are equal parts awe-inspiring and “someone call animal control.” Blair Brown’s Emily is mostly there to look concerned, which is basically every woman’s role in this film: emotional ballast for a guy who thinks devolution is a party trick.
The plot is like LSD on paper. We get sensory deprivation tanks, hallucinogenic mushrooms, sacred rituals in Mexico, and primal regression all mashed together with the subtlety of a gorilla in a Harvard lab. One minute Eddie is lecturing on schizophrenia, the next he’s devolving in front of a terrified radiologist who suddenly finds his X-ray belongs to a gorilla — a moment of cinematic “wait, what?” that sums up the film nicely. And yes, Drew Barrymore is in it, proving that child actors can appear in films that make absolutely no sense to anyone over the age of eight.
Russell’s direction is visually audacious — hallucinatory, swirling, and occasionally brilliant — but it’s all over the place in terms of narrative. The viewer is left feeling like they’ve been on a psychedelic rollercoaster designed by someone who read a science textbook once and then went straight to a nightclub. The body horror elements — Hurt turning into a caveman, a blob of conscious matter, a primordial soup incarnate — are grotesque and yet unintentionally funny if you think about it too long. Somewhere in that film, Eddie’s mouth is bleeding, he’s writing frantically, and you can’t help but wonder if this was supposed to be terrifying or just a PSA on not mixing hallucinogens with existential crises.
Altered States is one of those movies where ambition and self-importance fight each other to the death on screen, and the audience is the one left with the headache. It’s fascinating to watch, but also exhausting, like attending a lecture from a professor who keeps insisting that he’s redefining reality — all while wearing a monkey mask he made himself. Darkly humorous, deeply weird, and occasionally nauseating, it’s a cautionary tale: don’t play with your consciousness unless you enjoy seeing William Hurt go full caveman and possibly destroy the space-time continuum.
In short: a visual acid trip that’s 90% pretension, 10% horror, and 100% “did that just happen?” material.
