Mumbler

British comedy collective The League Of Gentlemen cornered the market on mixing the macabre and the mundane to surreal and comic effect. Here directors Wim Reygeart and Marc Roels try something similar and only serve to prove how difficult this sort of thing is to pull off.

The Mumbler of the title is an arrested-development type, who mutters incoherently into a tape recorder and fights with his overbearing mother (cue a man in drag who, sadly, has more in common with something from Monty Python then any of the League's more sinister creations). The rest of the film shows the Mumbler's odyssey through the local landscape, encountering nightmares along the way.

The plot is utterly incomprehensible - but Reygeart and Roels show talent for building an atmosphere. Although the overall film is a ragbag of ideas, taken scene by scene there are things to commend. They achieve an unsettling atmosphere by contrasting surreal moments - for example, a strange man/creature stripping off in the woods - with pastoral scenes featuring classical music. As a first-time experiment in mixing the banal and the bizarre, it's okay and occasionally unsettling, but never really gels as it should.