Surviving Life / Prezít Svuj Zivot

Directed by Jan Svankmajer. Starring Václav Helsus, Klára Issová, Zuzana Krónerová, Emília Doseková, Daniela Bakerova Club, IFI, Dublin, 109 min

MIDDLE-AGED SALARYMAN Evzen finally meets the beautiful younger woman of his dreams. The catch? She’s in his dreams.

Undeterred by the logistical difficulties, Evzen (Václav Helsus) chases the woman (Klára Issová). He signs up for psychoanalysis with Dr Holubová (Daniela Bakerova), visits an odd occult bookstore, and finally works out a short cut to REM stimulation.

Evzen's wife Milada (Zuzana Krónerová) is too obsessed with the lottery to notice that he is, figuratively speaking, running around. But as the affair continues, the dreams get freakier and freakier. The woman insists on using a different name every time they meet; she's Eva, then Emily, then Eliza. The couple are persistently interrupted by her son as well as her ex-husband Milan (also Helsus), an Evzen Doppelgänger.

The background noise in Evzen’s dreams gets louder as his psychoanalytic adventure continues. What’s up with all these broken eggs and melons? What does that creepy old crone (Emília Doseková) want? And how did this army of topless women with cockerel heads get here?

Curiouser and curiouser still. A gigantic snake slithers down through an overhead window and on to a street, where it swallows an unfortunate pedestrian whole. Copious quantities of vomit mostly miss a lavatory bowl. A teddy bear’s erect penis turns to sawdust as he hits the ground. Trucks carry large jars of frogs. Vagina-shaped flowers herald the arrival of the enigmatic love interest. Portraits of Freud and Jung kick at each other on the psychoanalyst’s wall.

It can only be a Jan Svankmajer joint. The Czech surrealist introduces this latest feature with an apologetic note: Surviving Lifeought to have been a live-action film until the budget reduced him to using cut-outs rather than actors. "Pictures don't eat," he notes.

The film-maker's use of chattering animated photographs on a collage background is, on first inspection, somewhat at odds with the Svankmajer house style of Alice and Little Otik. The director's greatest short films – those copulating hunks of steak from late-night MTV, the spewing clay of The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia– are characterised by his love of reshaping dead organic matter into stuttering, deformed life forms. But cut-outs and disembodied close-ups prove just as discombobulating and morbid. Photos simply shouldn't move like they do here.

The faux-Victorian collage of the Czech setting is very Monty Python- meets- Metamorphosis. It's wilfully unfashionable enough to complement a film that pivots around psychoanalytical theory. Long before Evzen's mystery is unravelled, it turns out we didn't need an analyst to explain Svankmajer's obsession with roosters.

Unsurprisingly, the darkest Freudian recesses of the film- maker's mind prove very dark indeed; once you've seen a man with a dog's head rape a poodle, you can never unsee it. Surviving Liferevels in grotesquerie before settling into a narrative groove and, even then, it seldom allows the viewer to get comfortable.

This is queasy endurance surrealism, populated by nasty, lurking things from the shadowy fringes of the unconscious. It’s the kind of film you should wait to see after eating.