Alice (dir Jan Svankmajer)

'Inspired by' Carroll's Alice rather than being a direct adaptation, this is a film I've wanted to watch for years - ever since I read about it somewhere on the internet ether. It's a little surrealist gem, bizarre motifs repeating and many (most) of the oddities of Carroll's original tale translated across directly if refractedly. Grotesque and even gruesome in places, but also delightfully (albeit darkly) whimsical and enough so to provoke laughter, surprised out of me by unexpectedly cognate allusions and suggestivenesses, it hints at overarching interpretations of both itself and its source text, but never stumbles into anything so facile as an explanation. Faintly unsettling, but not quite in the way provoked by the darker explorations of Ozon, say (I'm thinking especially of Criminal Lovers, though with something in common with those plumbings of the unconscious - there's a bit of the uncanny to it, and maybe an aspect of the 'uncanny valley', too, in the changeable and somehow frangible figure of Alice herself as she appears, ramified, throughout.