INK - The wet dream that leaves a stain.....

INK
Directed, Produced, Written and Edited by Jamin Winans



Starring:
Chris Kelly
Quinn Hunchar
Jessica Duffy
Jeremy Make
Jennifer Batter


Usually, a low budget feature length's worst enemy is an overabundance of big ideas. Trying to exact an elaborate Sistine Chapel of a piece with pencil crayons is a rough gig. That's not to say that reconciliation between huge visual ambition and humble means cannot be realized in the world of independent cinema, but unfortunately a flattering result is rarely attained. Compromise usually arises to meet these restraints in the form of great visions being dumbed down, or in equally tragic cases these ideas are brought to life using substandard practice. At times like these, bad filmmakers drown their work in dreadfully cheap looking CG and settle for a tarnished vision, but the good filmmakers, an increasingly rare bird, get inventive. INK is nothing if not inventive visually speaking, and director Jamin Winans has done one hell of a job of bringing a very vast and surreal landscape to fruition.


In one corner, we have “The Storytellers”, a group of young hip do-gooders who are responsible for our good dreams. Considering they kind of look like a Christian youth group trying to be edgy I have a hard time believing that they provide me with MY good dreams, but that's neither here nor there. In the other corner, the Incubi, a grim bunch of hellish squares who as you've likely reckoned, visit us with nightmares. Torn between these two factions is our eponymous moral drifter, INK.

The picture picks up with Ink on an errand to earn points and presumably soldier up with the Incubus clan. By their request he kidnaps the spirit of a young girl named Emma played by Quinn Hunchar. After thwarting the storytellers rescue plans in a really unique and hectic brawl and subsequent chase, Ink escapes to the safety of another plane of existence to deliver the kidnapped girl.

Back in our perceived “real world”, we meet John, Emma's estranged father, played by Chris Kelly. As all of the flashy fight sequences rage on and bizarre entities interact in the other world, we are brought back to his life at various points to watch as a small time business man turns in to a loathsome yuppie, incurring his fair share of demons along the way.

To set INK up any further would really just take away it's wow factor, and even though it has wow to spare, we won't take that road.

A good VS. evil fable at it's core, INK sits appropriately next to films like Timur Bekmambetov's NIGHT WATCH or PAN'S LABRYNTH, who's groundwork is in classic mythology and fantasy storytelling but with a pronounced focus on the darker end of the pond. The action is set primarily against an imaginative collection of eerie, washed out backdrops and shot in an appropriately dreamlike fashion with a penchant for exaggerated lighting. It is this visual head space that keeps some of the cheesier elements of the fantasy genre at bay and allows Winans to stretch the films reach in to sincere drama and full blown action at a moments notice without a jarring stylistic shift.

All of these elements at play do indeed sound like a potential mess, but in the end each of the flavors holds up. The dream land setting seems to stem less from a love of fantasy story telling and more from a need for license to play with insane and exaggerated landscapes. The highly stylized visual elements, which are without a doubt a highlight of the film and Winans forte above all else, could not have worked under any other circumstance but within the fantasy cannon. The action scenes are edited with frantic finesse, with more of a brawler sensibility rather than the white-suburban-kung-fu that tends to be the default action fodder of choice these days.

However, the added texture that allows INK to resonate that much brighter is it's dramatic counter plot set in our recognized “Real World”, a story carried squarely on the shoulders of lead Chris Kelly, who's conflicted performance anchors our sympathy and engagement amidst the otherworldly fantasy sequences. The way these two worlds dance around each other and ultimately collide, despite being on the convoluted side at points, is really impressive.

At the end of the day, a great deal of INK's strength may have relied on some of it's limitations, and I think there's probably a lesson or two big business Hollywood could take away from a little gem like this, if not from its narrative, at least from the fact that INK's entire budget cost equals about a frame of whatever trash Micheal Bay has in theaters at the moment.

-Skot Hamilton