 a beautiful actress struggles to connect with her disfigured costar on the set of a european auteur s englishlanguage debut armed with a sardonic sense of humor pure emotionality a reflective selfsarcastic mood and obsession with detail this enigmatic mesmerising melodrama holds in different ways all of cinema from tod browning s freaks and david lynch s the elephant man to robert altman s the player and peter strickland s berberian sound studio to give it a radically new substantial twist aaron schimberg  