Down The Rabbit Hole

Down The Rabbit Hole is an evocative mood-piece, strikingly photographed. A lot of effort clearly went into giving the audience an insight into the worlds the characters inhabit.

The immense technical skill and assured direction gives the impression of both being in love and infatuated with a handsome suitor. The early scenes of a sleeping heroine (filtered and shot so light blooms off every reflective surface) and soft, synthetic music combined with gentle, sensual sex and beauty treatments. The simple pleasures of being in love are so clear - being chased around a playpark by the same man, a merry-go-round of pleasure quickly dissolving to Bucharest gangsters and drug-trafficking.

It also handles being in a drug-induced haze brilliantly; the sheer shock of the foreign addictive chemicals hitting the system for the first time, done through editing, forced perspective and low-pass filtered sound.

The clash of these perspectives is reasonably well-handled, although little is done to unify them into a narrative. It might have been better as two short films, rather than together, where they do not gel.