The indefatigable Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer returns with another weird little tale, a parable on freedom and control that yokes together the spirits of the Marquis de Sade and Edgar Allan Poe. It’s filmed mostly in live action (though the odd sequence of scurrying chunks of meat is a reminder of Švankmajer’s glory days as a full-service animator). This has a distinctively glum, awkward cinematic style, which somehow suits the episodic, dreamlike nature of events: a young man (Pavel Liška) is squired through an 18th-century lunatic asylum, his Kafka-ish bewilderment mounting with every incident. In a spoken prologue Švankmajer tells us this is a “horror” film - if he’s right, it’s certainly the least conventional one of all time.