Icaros: A Vision

Icaros is a mini-epic of serene, intelligent mind-body wooziness.

Calling itself a "vision" as opposed to a "film," Icaros attempts to conquer fear — of death, of blindness, of loss — by accepting the potency of a magic it knows it will never understand.

Sidestepping the question of whether or not shamanic methods 'work' in a scientific sense, Caraballo and Norzi directly depict the psychedelic experience of Ayahuasca itself by seamlessly blending dream and reality into a single stunning whole.

The hallucinatory power of ayahuasca and the incantatory lure of rituals fuse with existential dread in this darkly hypnotic drama.

This trippy work maps the intersections of West and East, body and spirit, faith and terror with beguiling grace.

The film has a calming and inevitable quality, and a leisurely sense of pacing that favors image and sound over narrative propulsion, that slows our own biorhythms, fostering our sensorial empathy with the passengers.

Once in a while a narrator relates facts about the forest; occasional CGI flourishes don’t disappoint so much as they remind us of the challenges of summoning to the screen what the brain simply creates. Icaros comes closer than most movies manage.