Ink Movie – Superb

I just watched the movie Ink. Finally, as I had it for a while now, never managing to watch it before. And I have to say: Wow.

I don’t remember ever having been moved as much by a movie. I had some animes that moved me, but this piece of “real” movie – wow.

This movie is so much better than mainstream. You have an awesome and complex story, a pretty wide range of main characters and styles of story telling. You may notice it is not the over-polished AAA-movie, but that’s what gives it its own charm and in my opinion allowed it to be so creative and non-mainstream. I highly encourage you to watch it!

Read on for more details!

The movie

Ink is a 250k USD project, released in 2009. No major publisher picked it up, so the directors pitched the movie to independent theatres. The movie gained much attention in the web- and piracy scene when it hit the scene and TorrentFreak reported on it. First, it came into TorrentFreaks weekly Top 10 pirated movies, hit the imdb charts and according to the thankful directors in increased sales. The directors thanked everyone throughoutly, encouraging further spread of word and product, even adding a donation button to their webpage/store for the people who don’t want to buy the hard-copy, but still support the directors.

Well, now guess where I heard of this movie? 🙂

What I miss on their website store is a digital distribution copy. Being able to download the Full HD version without the need for a bluray player. With the soundtrack, directors commentary and bonus deleted scene, I’d be happy to spend 15 or 20 USD – which the DVD and BluRay versions cost as well. With a world-wide market, I appreciate their take on with appreciation for distributed and self-organising publicity, and their personally signing each hard copy they send out, but providing high quality digital distributions would add a lot more. For them as well, not having to ship to wherever you are sitting on this world.

Slight spoilers follow. If you intend to watch it anyway already, watch it instead of reading the following!

The movie is a masterpiece. The story evolves around a universe of dream-initiators or -controllers, using portals to travel between dimensions(?) and places. The second part of the story is a man who has become a workaholic after having lost his wife to a car accident, and having to give away his daughter to the grandparents because of his drug abuse and absence from home – as he worked very much before as well. While the family-story is one of deep meaning, the parallel happenings in the – I’ll call it – dream world are more action focused with regular close combat fighting. These take place right in the real world, however can not be seen in the real world itself.

The daughter of said man is kidnapped by a creature named Ink, who is being influenced by some dark nightmare-bringers, while some happy-dream-bringers fight to try to prevent the kidnapping and later to bring her back. Look forward to when the 2 stories and worlds merge together!

(Spoilers ended here)

Not being able to choose one of the images from the stills page on the website as none is sufficiently representative in my eyes, and the style differs so much, speaks a ton as well.

I don’t watch many movies. But this one is a masterpiece. This is how movies should be like. Awesome stylistic scenes and a complex story with meaning. Not some standard, predictable AAA hollywood title, which you can put into 1 of 3 categories and already have the receipt of the movie. This one I full heartedly enjoyed and was moved. Sorry, really, that I can’t find anything to criticize (besides missing digital distribution).

Check out the trailers: