Direction: Albert Birney, Kentucker Audley
Country: USA
Strawberry Mansion is a sci-fi romance that seems to have taken inspiration from surrealist works by Terry Gilliam, Jan Svankmajer and David Lynch. Intermittently interesting, the film is an uneven hallucinogenic trip that suddenly gets lost in its own eccentricities. Transmission of ads into dreams? Outdated VHS tapes with bizarre creatures? Strange encounters that lead to past lives? Sure! All that would be valid if experimentalism and articulation had worked in better consonance.
Written and directed by Kentucker Audley, who also stars as the committed dream auditor James Preben, and Albert Birney, Strawberry Mansion may be remembered in the future, but not in the way the filmmakers intended. Undeniably artful, this gaudy chimera finds most of its appeal on the puzzling side of the picture. The magic never reaches those stages of awe and enchantment we look for in this type of movie, and the directors didn't spend enough time building their characters.
Despite the heavy symbolism, it all becomes more visually awkward within a dreamworld facade rather than something actually smart. Moreover, the puffs of dark humor didn’t work for me, only the score by electronic musician Dan Deacon felt adequate for the visual communication intended. At once disaffected and ludicrous, it’s difficult to tell if this fatiguing oddity wants to be dark or funny.
