The most memorable fantasy movies are often the ones with the biggest budgets, which comes with the territory when sweeping visuals and impeccable effects required to do justice to high concept stories don’t come cheap. That being said, 2009’s Ink was made on a shoestring budget of just $250,000, yet ranks as one of the genre’s most acclaimed entries of the last decade and a half.
Recommended VideosOn Rotten Tomatoes, the ambitious undertaking orchestrated by writer, director, producer, editor, and composer Jamin Winans holds a perfect 100 percent critical approval rating, while upwards of 5000 user ratings have deemed it worthy of an impressive 81 percent score. Those are incredible numbers for such a small-scale production, but entirely deserved.
The story sounds fairly simple on paper, with a man attempting to save his daughter from a world where the forces of light and darkness find themselves locked in an eternal war, but it’s all about the execution. Completely belying its minimal costs, Ink is an aesthetic tour-de-force that comes across as a much more expensive film than it is, all while the narrative beats prove engaging enough to underline that it isn’t all style without a hint of substance.
If you were to build a cult classic from the ground up, then it would look a lot like Ink. It came along without much in the way of fanfare in spite of almost unanimous acclaim, before being largely lost to the sands of time. With any justice, it’ll eventually find the size of audience it deserves, because no self-respecting fan of the fantastical should go about their business without having seen it at least once.
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