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Peru, United States · 2017
1h 30m
Director Matteo Norzi
Starring
Genre Drama
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In search of a miracle, an American woman embarks on a journey to the Peruvian Amazon. What she finds is a mystical community steeped in ritual. With her perception forever altered, she forges a bond with a young indigenous shaman --- who is undergoing a crisis of his own --- and a motley crew of psychonauts seeking transcendence, companionship, and the meaning of life.
Village Voice by Alan Scherstuhl
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.
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.
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
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.
CineVue by Maximilian Von Thun
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 New York Times by Neil Genzlinger
You may find this sparse film maddeningly elusive, but chances are you’ll come out of it with your head spinning, in a good way.
This trippy work maps the intersections of West and East, body and spirit, faith and terror with beguiling grace.
The New Yorker by Richard Brody
The hallucinatory power of ayahuasca and the incantatory lure of rituals fuse with existential dread in this darkly hypnotic drama.
Los Angeles Times by Robert Abele
Icaros is a mini-epic of serene, intelligent mind-body wooziness.
Friendship overcomes any obstacle.