Dan (Klaus Tange) arrives home from a trip, to find his apartment locked from the inside. Having busted the door in, he discovers his wife is missing, with no signs of a struggle, but all the messages he'd been leaving her since he left still on the answering machine. He gets drunk, waiting for his wife to come home... and this is the last time this movie makes what you might refer to as any kind of 'sense'.
Using one part David Lynch dream logic and one part Dario Argento nightmare gallio horror, Dan's trip around his apartment building, talking to neighbours and strangers, detectives and (possibly) ghosts or figments of his own fracturing mind, Strange Colour is soaked in atmospheric 70's atmosphere and experimental visuals and sound design.
It's a sensory overload of kaleidoscopic images (sometimes literally) of half faces and weirdly placed split screens, as well orgasm soundscapes with lashings of constantly creaking leather and clacking high hells on marble. The whole astethic is designed to knock you off balance, constantly question what is real and what is a dream. Or a fantasy. Or a nightmare.
Which, of course, is just as much a recommendation as it is a warning. Never quite nailing the dread that Lynch can conjure, and too often letting the histrionics of the presentation overwhelm in a way that Argento would never allow, there are going to be just as many people leaving within ten minutes of exposure to this as there will be glued to their chairs come the closing credits.
Tange does incredibly work as a man put through an extended psychological torture house, exposed (as are we) to maddening images and visceral violence, but the meaning behind swings back and forth between completely mystifying and overtly obvious. There's a lot of stuff going on about sex, lust, voyeurism and sado-masochism, with vagina symbolism EVERYWHERE, but what it all means is anyone's guess.
A glimpse into the descent of madness is hardly anyone's idea of a good time, but if you're looking for as close as cinema can get to it, then The Strange Colour Of Your Body's Tears is for you.
