The Rainbow Experiment (2018) User Reviews

It's Black & White: "The Rainbow Experiment" is a Convoluted Mess

[jtncsmistad · 4/10 · 17 December 2018]

There's a lot goin' on in the time-shifting mystery drama "The Rainbow Experiment". Too damn much, actually.

Not to imply that Writer/Director Christina Kallas isn't abundantly ambitious in presenting this tragic tale set in a New York City High School. But there are far too many ill-defined characters involved in a surfeit of underdeveloped or out and out inexplicable predicaments to make it wholly palatable.

Still kudos go to veteran actresses Laura Pruden as a no-b.s. police investigator with a soul and Francis Benhamou, a school counselor who believes she can rescue kids who sadly may have long since passed the point of saving.

Waste of Film, Actors & Time

[Dolphchiarino123 · 4/10 · 28 July 2019]

The story of a chemistry class experiment that goes wrong & for over 2 hours this movies bounces all over the place with as many as 4 split screens with interviews, parents, teachers, etc. arguing, fighting, blaming & just plain BS going in 5 different directions. In the end, nothing really happens & the movie pans out in reverse telling the audience this & that never happened. I can't imagine this garbage getting a 6.6 rating on this app. This movie sucked fro beginning to end....

an investigative chaos

[ops-52535 · 5/10 · 24 May 2019]

When things happens to a pupil/student at school, all hell is loose, in fact on everybody and from everybody. then add all the outside investigative sources coming in, the union laywers, the shamans, and of course the pta and the parents themselves. its hard on hard on delivering guilt, but the unique thing in this film is that the victim himself follows the action at all levels as a ghost/spirit, and gives some informational hints to what happened, or what seemed to happen or what was actually really happening.

to make a film like this, youll need order, and this film does not have that order at all. its like flashing from room to room, meeting to meeting, conversation to conversation at a breathless pace. the filmography are not the best and the camera is moving nonstop,so you have no chance to fix your eyes at a subject, its a trick to divert you away from the truth, but that alon with the use of 2 split, 3split,4split and 6 split screens, makes you even more bewildered on what the director wants to tell. the sound quality are bad at times, and the quality is next to seeing the mic hanging down between the actors..

though its an interesting issue and topic, the makers of this film has not given a prescribed way of telling a straight story, and the grumpy old man who loved to see magnesium flare up in the classroom when student, barely recommends this one.

Great actors, terrible movie.

[Lexiii67 · 5/10 · 23 August 2019]

This could have been great if they had stuck to the actual storyline. Instead it became very convoluted and confusing, the timeline was all over the place. I just wanted to follow the kids and what happened to them. I don't really know how it ended, too.

Could have been a great movie, but too chaotic

[bellacain · 6/10 · 13 August 2019]

This movie could have been great, but it was chaos to watch. The overlapping talking, the split screens, the random conversations. It's like they tried to cram a bunch on characters/plots into one movie. Every adult seemed scared of themselves and neurotic.

The fog of real life

[heliot-93181 · 9/10 · 15 June 2019]

The Rainbow Experiment is an unsettling movie. One can imagine oneself as any of the different characters as the disaster in a school unfolds: the volatile teenagers, the angry and grieving parents, the professionals and staff locked in mutual combat. We experience the friction of nonsense and truth, secrecy and revelation, uncanny wisdom and stunning stupidity that we all are capable of. The multiple characters' backstories are confusing and sometimes excessive, but they add to the real-life feel of the film. The jumpy urban cinematography, split screen, and sudden scene shifts enhance the sense of everything happening at once. Random encounters between people build to an emotional climax....that may or may not be real. It's for you to decide.

Excellent Schoolhouse Drama

[TheAll-SeeingI · 10/10 · 10 September 2019]

"The Rainbow Experiment" is a deeply dimensional and immersive schoolhouse drama in which a chemistry class experiment goes horribly awry, leaving a student in a coma.

Students and adult leadership wallow in the aftermath as we learn the backstories of each through some wonderfully unconventional and clever storytelling constructs, including tour guide narration from the lingering spirit of the comatose teen - played by Connor Siemer - who breaks the fourth wall to introduce us to the players in this ensemble cast. Throughout, our suspicions of humanity are largely confirmed: When tragedy strikes near and around us, it's not the empathetic lens of the stricken we see through, but instead we're immersed in our own absorptions relative to the event.

This is a highly ambitious film in the layering of its dramatic and suspenseful story. In a day and age in which major studios admittedly streamline film plots with the presumption their distracted home viewing audiences will be simultaneously navigating their phones, "The Rainbow Experiment" demands that you put your handheld devices down for two hours, and promises a richly nuanced payout in return.

A haunting, emotional inspection of a normal day suddenly turned horrific

[vireaper · 9/10 · 8 December 2019]

Set at an American school, this film revolves around an accident, a science experiment gone wrong that leaves one student clinging to life and the rest of the students and staff in utter chaos. The film opens with the moments leading up to the tragedy and from there it quickly expands as you watch the varied reactions and responses to the incident. It is fascinating, one day under an intense microscope as teachers break down, cover-up and politicize, bringing their own personal baggage into an already manic situation. The parents bicker and rage and the students assign blame and fight as they try to comprehend what happened whilst dealing with their own real life problems and situations. Like the idea of the Butterfly Effect or the waves that eminate from the drop of a pebble in water, everyone involved is twisted up and rocked in some way.

Using a large ensemble cast of mostly unknowns, it would have been easy to lose track of the story or for the individual characters to get lost but this does not happen. In fact the number of actors involved helps the film as we watch them interact, their own personal journeys contorted by others and the situation. Overheard conversations, school mis-managment and simple mistakes become huge problems and cause life changing decisions. This is high drama, people on their worst day, but the acting is sublime never straying into histrionics and over acting. Every reaction is real, understandable and the direction aids this immeasurably, with the camera almost like a bystander, an eavesdropper in every room. The editing is also magnificent, with the use of jagged jump cuts, split screen and blurry effects that add to the tension and the constant sense of unease.

In all, a magnificent film that really hits you hard, keeps you interested and emotionally engaged and that you think about long after the credits roll.

A very gritty film

[vigilant56 · 9/10 · 1 November 2019]

The Rainbow Experiment is a gritty, unsettling dramatic film that will have your eyes glued to the screen from beginning to end. I highly reccomend this film.

Like a high school teacher-parent version of Crash

[nitrojinx · 23 October 2020]

There are a lot of plots to follow. Maybe too many. But I enjoyed the gritty hand-held shots and plot twists.