Chained for Life review – clever comedy-horror toys with reality

This low-budget film written and directed by Aaron Schimberg is almost every kind of strange, and yet it has an amiable warmth and an inexhaustible reserve of originality that make it compelling as hell. Packed with rambling digressions, sudden shifts of tone, and playful fake-outs as it shuttles between layers of “reality” and performance, but constructed with precision and assurance, it leaves you with both a sugar high and slight sense of nausea.

At a former hospital, a film crew gather to shoot a low-budget comedy-drama-horror movie within the low-budget comedy-drama-horror movie that is Chained for Life itself. A director (Charlie Korsmo), who may actually be German or just faking the Werner Herzog accent, has managed to cast Mabel Fairchild (Jess Weixler), a famous actor up for slumming it in this indie effort as the ingenue in a period work about a mad scientist (Stephen Plunkett) and a hospital full of people with unusual physiognomies, including an extremely tall man, folk with severe burns scars, a pair of conjoined twins, and a “bearded” lady.

In the film within the film, Mabel’s character is meant to fall in love with Rosenthal (British actor Adam Pearson, who featured in Under the Skin), a character who, like Pearson himself, has the disfiguring disease neurofibromatosis, which was thought to be the condition Joseph Merrick, AKA the Elephant Man, had. Mabel does seem to develop feelings for Rosenthal, although they’re not so easy to define.

Schimberg wrongfoots the viewer by presenting scenes with overlapping dialogue that appear to be just the actors talking among themselves but then turn out to be scenes from the film. Before long, dream sequences or perhaps discarded segments interweave and intersect with the upper reality of the story, only to subside again.

Throughout, shiny little movie-buff allusions glitter and glint amid the mix, referencing both obvious touchstones, such as Tod Browning’s Freaks and George Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, and deliciously left-field samplings, for example from The Muppet Movie. Cult movie enthusiasts will revel in ticking off the titles, but this surreal story works just fine in its own right.

• Chained for Life is released in the UK on 25 October.