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After the fiasco of The Brothers Grimm, I was apprehensive about seeing this movie, which Terry Gilliam filmed while still feuding with the Weinstein brothers over the final cut of Grimm. My concerns stemmed mainly from the terrible reviews Tideland received during its limited theatrical release; it appeared possible that this film was an even worse disaster than its immediate predecessor. Fortunately, the critical consensus turns out to be way off the mark; while Tideland isn't as great as Gilliam's early masterpieces, it's still a fascinating piece of work with a coherent aesthetic vision and a magnificent lead performance from Jodelle Ferland, whose appearance in Silent Hill didn't even begin to suggest she was capable of this level of acting.

Ferland plays Jeliza-Rose, an imaginative young girl innocent enough at the start of the story to help her heroin-addicted father (Jeff Bridges) tie off and shoot up without even noticing that something is horribly wrong; when her mother, portrayed by Jennifer Tilly as a grotesque, bloated Courtney Love-esque harridan, dies while attempting to kick her own habit, Jeliza-Rose and her father move to her grandmother's house, a deserted wreck in the middle of nowhere. And that's when things get really strange, as the film shifts from Fear & Loathing-style squalor and desolation to a contrast between the vast, flat, wheat-filled exteriors that Jeliza-Rose explores with the decapitated doll heads that serve as her constant companions and expressions of various aspects of her personality, and the claustrophobic interiors with their constant intimations of death and decay.

It's no spoiler to reveal that Bridges doesn't wake up from one of his heroin "vacations", though Jeliza-Rose seems determined to deny the obvious reality. She continues to treat Daddy as though he might wake up any minute, and starts exploring her new surroundings. Things turn much darker when she meets up with Dell (Janet McTeer), a creepy taxidermist with an intense fear of bees and a mysterious connection to Jeliza-Rose's father; and the film gets much creepier once Dell's mentally challenged brother Dickens (Brendan Fletcher) enters the picture, and Jeliza-Rose strikes up an uncomfortably flirtatious friendship with him.

I think this aspect of Tideland is what unsettles most viewers, and accounts for a lot of the negative press the movie has received. It's not so much Dickens's behavior that's upsetting; rather, Jeliza-Rose seems both innocent and knowing beyond her years in the way she approaches him, and while nothing sexual ever happens, the way Ferland's performance suggests that this extremely young girl already has some innate understanding of her own sexuality undoubtedly upsets some viewers. I saw it as a realistic quality, and also a positive element of her character: since she's in control of the situation, she doesn't allow herself to be abused or exploited. But there's no getting around the creepiness of the film's final half-hour, and how you respond to Tideland will probably be determined by whether or not you think it goes too far in these scenes.

Anyone familiar with Gilliam's past work, though, will be in familiar territory here, as he uses many of his familiar visual distortions (especially diagonally skewed camera angles) and eschews CG effects in favor of much more laboriously constructed, organic constructions; it works brilliantly in a film full of preserved corpses and rotting, decrepit houses. After Grimm, it's a relief to see that Gilliam's visual imagination hasn't left him after all. And the performances are uniformly excellent, though Tilly is stuck portraying more of a caricature than a character; but Ferland is by far the standout, making Jeliza-Rose into a fully rounded human being, and she does a fantastic job at conveying the fluidity of Jeliza-Rose's imagination, and the way her interior world is deeply connected to the harsh realities of her existence.

Rating: 9/10