Something of a Frankenstein’s Monster – both thematically and stylistically – with the all too viscerally raw treatment of its subject matter patched with a generally over-stylised visual surface with about half a dozen styles abrasively jostling for attention.

As an experience it’s not without interest, but that’s what it felt like: an experience (with all the allusions to the fairground and raw sensation). It’s essentially penny plain story is over layered (smothered even) in so much top dressing and hard-edged shock, that it almost becomes a staccato succession of sensations (rather than anything more cerebrally engaging) and the stiff, unconvincing dialogue rarely engages, especially in the psycho-babble that reveals ittle. One wished to scream out at various points that grief stricken characterisation is not just established by tears and screaming; yet here short-hand sketches seems to suffice in a paucity of true introspection supplanted by a wanton need to shock and let it all hang out.

Structurally it reminded me a little of the dread conveyed in the segmental Salo with its downward spiral of chapters; plus Misery, countless horror films and even the Tall Guy in that rather daftly set-up Prologue.

I rather liked its organic allusions to mans primitive place in nature (somewhat Green Man in tone), but even these felt more like decorative flourishes diminished by whooshing sound and stylised visuals than anything truly integral. Visual surface is not enough.

Sometimes one wishes to strip film makers of the SFX box of tricks and Dolby Digital sound and practically chain them to pen-and-paper in pursuit of a purposefully scripted story, not a dozen short pop videos and commercials laced together.