Ok, so interesting.

This is not a very good movie. A young girl, whose twin sister drowned while they were playing as a child and she hallucinated Udo Kier beckoning her towards a strange portal while her parents wailed, comes back as a young woman to party with her friends and visit the house. Halfway through, she switches to a fantasy world where she learns her sister may still be trapped, and encounters phantasmagorical visions of people she knows as she wanders a desert and tries to free her.

It’s visually well-made, reminiscent of if Guillermo Del Toro tried to retell “Alice In Wonderland” as the sort of disturbingly off-kilter film Udo Kier might star in. It uses a very classic, ’40s or ’50s style orchestral score, and once it gets going—which takes a long time—there’s a lot of really beautiful costumes, masked characters, etc. In fact, on that level, I would say it worked well enough that I actually enjoyed it.

The problem is, it takes half the film before the fantasy sequence begins. And once it does, though it’s nice to look at, it kind of retreads familiar ground—it desperately wants to be, say, “Mirrormask”, but just isn’t quite there in terms of story telling.

Unfortunately it takes more than good costume design and a moderately successful attempt to evoke classic studio-age movie production flourishes to make a great movie. I desperately want to label this an interesting enough failure to watch, but unfortunately, it’s not quite. Still, it’s now too terrible and it is cinematically beautiful in places, so maybe worth a watch if there’s really nothing else but bottom-tier movies on.