Critics reviews

As odd as it may sound, the movie is also a lot of fun. Gilliam's trusty DP, Nicola Pecorini, embraces the film's madness, and has a ball showing Jeliza-Rose frolicking through her valley of death and decay as if it were a field of daisies. In typical Gilliam fashion, he shoots everything using wide angle lenses, so we can always watch and see everything – every action, movement and Hunter Thompson-inspired gesture – happening on screen.

Hallucinatory and extremely unpleasant, it involves a nine-year-old girl who loses her junkie parents (Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly) and sets off for crazed adventures in rural Texas, conversing with various rodents and a collection of dolls' heads and meeting up with a taxidermist witch (Janet McTeer) and her mentally challenged brother (Brendan Fletcher). Enter this diseased Lewis Carroll universe at your own risk.

You cannot call Tideland "bad". There is much of the old genius here, but it is strangely muddled and sad, perhaps from years of disappointment... Disappointment is, perhaps, the driving theme behind Tideland, from Noah's unrealized dream to move to Jutland and become a Norse chieftan, to the almost-friendships of Jeliza-Rose with the resident nutjobs-on-the-prairie.

The worst that can be said of the first two-thirds of “Tideland” is that it is tiresome. Toward the end it becomes creepy, and not in a good way. The sexuality of children, and its exploitation by adults, is about as delicate a subject as a movie can address, but a film like Gregg Araki’s “Mysterious Skin” proves that it can be done with seriousness and integrity, neither of which is in evidence here.

Words like "bad" and "failure" don't really suit when it comes to Tideland. The movie is brave, strong, deeply felt, and frequently brilliant, and it does exactly what it sets out to do. But what it sets out to do is distressingly unpleasant.

Fittingly ending with a train wreck, Tideland careens about wildly to only slightly rewarding effect, its out-there excessiveness eventually conveying not the resilience of youthful imaginations but, rather, the limits of unchecked auteurism.

Tideland is a fairy tale of the Alice In Wonderland variety told in the melodramatic style of David Lynch’s Wild At Heart. On paper this sounds great, but... the film heads downhill faster than our young protagonist dives into a rabbit hole.

Gilliam’s brash disregard for conventional narrative rhythms and structures is one of the many thrills of his best work, but here his freewheeling navigations veer so far off-road that the passenger is left exhausted and bewildered, not least by the blasts of literally flatulent humour.

Tideland, with its gleeful nastiness, recovers a little of the spirit of the earlier TV genius... For the first time in ages, Terry Gilliam has shown he can deliver the snakebite.

[H]is [Terry Gilliam's] style is a bad match for Tideland‘s themes of child abandonment, intellectual disability and abnormal child sexual awareness. The result is an unpleasant film that is both dull and deeply unsettling to the point that you want to take a shower after seeing it.

As has too often been the case, Gilliam works so hard on the wonderful details — see-sawing camerawork, dilapidated but magical art direction, flights of grimy fantasy — that the overall effect of the film goes badly wrong.