Tideland - Region 2 DVD

It’s not difficult to see why. Tideland is about a little girl whose imagination becomes her refuge when first her mother dies of a drug overdose, then her deadbeat father follows suit, leaving her alone in a house surrounded by endless fields and lurking lunatics.

Tideland has been compared with Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth; but where the latter film had a brutal wartime backdrop, Tideland is set in the sunny but isolated world of the American deep South, and the nightmare creatures of the Labyrinth are exchanged for battered dolls’ heads. Left to his own devices, Gilliam does tend to make very strange films, and this is no exception. Tideland’s real strength is in its lead actress: for an eleven-year-old to carry a film that tackles death, drugs and child abuse is a tall order, but Jodelle Ferland manages it spectacularly. --Sarah Dobbs