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A dark but humorous portrait of a young girl's reaction to emotional trauma directed by Terry Gilliam. After her drug-addicted mother's overdose, city kid Jeliza-Rose, is taken by her well-meaning father to a house he'd purchased for his now-dead mother in a remote rural area. The youngster's behaviour becomes increasingly erratic as she struggles to deal with her new, rather grim reality. The local people are a truly motley bunch with more than a few bizarre idiosyncrasies, further fuelling Jeliza's imagination.

This surreal fantasy that has been described as "Alice In Wonderland meets Psycho". It's poetic, funny, gleefully nasty and infused with quality performances and beautiful photography.

In his introduction to "Timeland", Terry Gilliam states that he, at the age of sixty-four, "finally discovered the child within himself." But looking back on his nine ... more >

In his introduction to "Timeland", Terry Gilliam states that he, at the age of sixty-four, "finally discovered the child within himself." But looking back on his nine films (not counting Python), you get the feeling there's always been a child in there. At least, all of those films are in some way about the power of the imagination, the power of innocence. They are fairy tales, and fairy tales come from the same department of the subconscious as nightmares.
"Tideland", Gilliam states, is a mixture of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Psycho". And you immediately remember Hitchcock saying once, that "Psycho" actually was nothing but his version of "Little Red Riding Hood": the girl goes astray, and meets a wolf in women's clothes.
There is no doubt about it, the wolf in grandma's clothes is an image that would tempt Gilliam - if Hitchcock hadn't already done it in his own astounding way. And watching "Tideland", I found that I reacted in almost exactly the same way as I did the first time I saw "Psycho" - the images are so potent, they break straight through the brain's defensive system and connect directly to your subconscious - the inner child, if you will.
As we know, "Psycho" is the most copied film in film history. But Gilliam, being a film-maker of a different mould, does not reside to barely homage or pastiche. He takes the images of Hitchcock, galvanized in our memory, and brings them a step further: there's no nightmare-shower in "Tideland", but a cornfield that becomes an entire ocean of the imagination, full of sharks and submarines.

But first and foremost, this is a film about the childish mind, linking directly back to the boy who went discovering in "Time Bandits", the daydreaming grown-up man in "Brazil" and the old liar in "Munchausen" who knew that imagination is what keeps you alive. All of them films by an astounding film-maker, who never is tempted to just give his audience a good time, but keeps pushing us to go search for that child inside ourselves.
And it is, of course, an unsettling experience. Gilliam has always been uncompromising in his approach, and one can understand the controversy a film like this makes, when it takes the child for granted, refuses to see it from the adult point of view, but forces the audience to see through the eyes of the child. < less