"A Scanner Darkly," set "seven years from now" in Anaheim, Calif., pulls us into a world so lost in narcotic oblivion (20 percent of the population is hooked on a drug called Substance D) that no one quite grasps the larger dystopia. Even undercover cops -- such as Bob Arctor (Keanu Reev es ) -- don't get the big picture. They're caught up in their own workday ordeals.

At home, Bob is a regular guy, partaking of Substance D with his addicted housemates. But those friends -- played with entertainingly addled banter by Robert Downey Jr., Woody Harrelson and Rory Cochrane -- don't know Bob's a narc. He prowls the neighborhood in a "scramble suit," a sort of two-way-mirror garment that allows him to see out but obscures his identity with shape-shifting images of human faces. His friends have no hint of something more insidious: Bob has been assigned to watch them, as well as his drug-dealing girlfriend, Donna Hawthorne (Winona Ryder), so he can catch their suppliers. There are more twists ahead.

Richard Linklater's adaptation of Philip K. Dick's novel of the same name is in a special dimension. The director has re-rendered scenes -- which he shot and filmed with Reeves, Ryder and others -- with an electronic, watercolorish wash, transforming everything into a restive painting.

Without its animation, "A Scanner Darkly" would have made a fine cautionary tale about drug addiction, paranoia and institutional treachery in a police state. But with a technique that turns the existing live action into a two-dimensional cartoon, the movie goes one -- maybe even 10 -- better. It becomes its own living, breathing metaphor. The characters look as though they have been flattened inside a glass slide, a perfect visual reflection of their political and psychological binds.

-- Desson Thomson (July 14, 2006)

Contains drug use, cartoon nudity, profanity, sexual content and a brief violent image.