A bizarre name for the strangest of films. This is a mythic, airy, sepia-toned melodrama about megalomania, art and tragic love.

When Malvina (Amira Casar), a beautiful opera singer, dies suddenly during a performance, her corpse is spirited away by the sinister Dr Droz (Gottfried John). Droz wishes to galvanise her for his own strange operatic creation.

We follow a wispy, Italian man Felisberto (Cesar Sarachu), a celebrated piano tuner, as he arrives on Droz's pianoless island to tune the bad doctor's automata. The obsessive Droz instructs the piano tuner to prime these strange mechanical contraptions, featuring spinning cogs and dead-eyed dolls, for the night of a lunar eclipse, which is when Droz will lead the masterpiece and avenge the opera world that has rejected him.

As Felisberto goes about his work, he is teased by Droz's alluring and flirtatious housekeeper Assumpta (a raven-haired Assumpta Serna oozing sensuality), and finds his true yearning when he spies the undead opera singer taking her daily airs.

The film is so surreal it defies description, which is probably exactly how The Quay Brothers would like it. The period could be that of a Jules Verne novel. The atmosphere is macabre and otherworldly. The visuals are an odd mix of stop-motion animation, sequences dreamed out of a gothic imagination, with heavy doses of often indecipherable imagery and symbolism. So don't ask what it all means, just watch. A total original, if slightly irritating with it.