Terry Gilliam

Terry Gilliam's own summary of Tideland is Alice in Wonderland meeting Psycho. Mark Sinker's archive text opens the formula out: the Psycho reference points not at the killer in the shower but at the mummy in the cellar, which is to say at the embalmer's domestic order and his past. Sinker thinks Gilliam has cheerfully stopped caring about mainstream bankability with this film, and reckons from the walkouts at preview screenings that plenty of people will take it for a ghastly, self-regarding, unshowable piece of madness. That last judgement is the audience's in his text, not his own.