Shadowplay is a 2019 thriller about a private eye who takes a case to find a missing university student, exploring the deep dark depths of his own mind to uncover the truth.
Everything about director Tony Pietra Arjuna‘s experimental fantasy film Shadowplay begins and ends with how it looks (and sounds), the neon saturated, 80s noir, synth-laced effort a trippy, stylistic challenge that earns most of its points for how hard it works to be just that. Filmed in Kuala Lumpur and using much of the Malaysian city’s colorful landscapes as background, the all English story is if anything, unique, a conversation-heavy mind bender that may not have the fast-paced high acceleration of many in the genre, but is not without some momentum – especially in the late stages – mostly because its expressive visual storytelling will lead you readily down the troubling rabbit hole.
Private detective Anton Shaw (Tony Eusoff) is not on stable ground. Still reeling from a deeply traumatic incident as a child, the man now struggles to keep reality in check. Images of his past circle his mind in endless rings, but are given further weight when he’s hired to find a young woman named Lamya (Juria Hartmans), who it seems might be connected to what happened years before. The more he digs, the worse his demons work to knock him down, an 80s fantasy game book he’s reading – where the reader chooses the adventure – lulling him steadily into uncertainty if what he’s seeing is real or not. However, when he discovers Lamya’s diary, he thinks it might be a portal that allows its owner to rewrite their life and become whatever they want. He wonders if in fact she might have used it to create her own fantasy world … or is this just one more break in his own psyche?
Tapping a bit into some of the trendy 80s nostalgia currently sweeping over the entertainment landscape, Shadowplay is a weird ride, one that will be hard to figure out for most, it skipping about between red-neon soaked flashbacks, purple-infused present day, and multi-colored shades of nightmares of altered reality, the latter often punctuated by bizarre acts of graphic violence. Arjuna, who co-wrote the screenplay, refuses to hold our hands, even with a heavy dose of flat narration, sort of combining what looks like ancient folklore and mythology with a modern spin on suspense.
Believe me, you won’t know what the hell is going on for most of the first half or more, and the near complete lack of movement by anyone or anything is a definite test of patience, the pop synth score (by Stellar Dreams) bubbling over it all with an absurd confidence only adding to the WTF?-ness. This is not your average whodunnit movie. However, it is partially because it does this, and then binds it with such accomplished visual intensity, it’s hard to knock what Arjuna is after. Here’s a filmmaker not just committed to his singular artistic flourish, he’s consumed by it, having you question what you’re looking at from frame one. That’s the point. Which is real and which is not? And does it matter? This will absolutely not be for everyone. I’m not even sure I wrapped my head around it the way I am supposed to. But it at least had me thinking, and that’s a rare thing in movies these days.