Tideland

Saw Tideland, a Gilliam film. This one was about death. An adorable little girl and her heroine junkie father move to a house on an endless, sweeping prairie. The junkie father rambles endlessly about Norse legends and bog mummies, and he wears a yggdrasil symbol on his back (about the Yggdrasil, several important scenes happen in the shadows of gnarled old trees and holes and tunnels feature prominently.) His Norse obsessions leads him to surround his dead wife with her favourite possessions before trying to set the whole heap on fire.

A crazy neighbour lady spouts kinda-christian rhetoric and clearly her interests are more to do with resurrection. We discover she's twisted this idea away from the metaphysical and attempts to give the dead a literal, corporeal life after death. She is deathly allergic to bees, which are sometimes symbols of resurrection, signifying her corruption of the concept. Resurrection is also a mini theme. A one point the girl dreams her dolls are resurrected as angels and babies. Throughout, the adorable girl is trying to come to terms with the deaths around her (which I found a bit hard to swallow. She looks old enough to recognize death, if perhaps not to deal with it appropriately.) This she does mainly by means of escaping into increasingly elaborate dream worlds, starting with Alice in Wonderland and soon compounding her own whimsy with the other characters' madness and imbecility.

Waves of water and grain are used to symbolize the process of death (especially her father's death. Note his dying words.) By the end of the film, the girl has dived deep and can only be rescued by one of the neighbours who owns a (pretend) submarine. Only by the cataclysmic "end of the world" can she move on with her life.

Note of course that all of the above is just my reading. I tend to get carried away by perceived patterns and themes and symbols and so forth, so have a few grains of salt, won't you? Symbols & c aside, the film is quite grotesque, featuring a lot of queasy bits. There's a healthy dose of splendid visuals and one or two breathtaking scenes (the fall down the rabbit hole, the crawling through the closet) but be warned: this isn't the kind of film to watch with other people present.