Chaotic Ana

Aroview: Spanish auteur Julio Medem (SEX AND LUCIA) returns with this abstractly ambitious, idiosyncratic undertaking, meshing the self-exploration of a young free-spirited artist with a regressive series of death visions she experiences while under hypnosis.

Shoehorning some crude political symbolism into another of Medem’s stubbornly ineffective palindromic narratives (see LOVERS OF THE ARCTIC CIRCLE), this leaps capriciously across space and time with conceptual abandon, loosing the first half’s faint whiff of cohesion in favour of some dimestore spiritual mysticism and Almodovar-lite feminism. A frustrating, intermittently moving experience that some may read as avant-garde claptrap; however those predisposed to the director’s recurring themes and particular brand of surrealism will probably lap this up.