Music video director extraordinaire Michel Gondry’s third feature film (after Human Nature and the superb Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) follows Mexican Stéphane, who moves to live in France near to his mother following his father’s death. Stéphane is a designer, seeking to market his calendar based on famous natural disasters; but his relationship with reality is shaky to say the least, and he spends most of his time inside his head, either dreaming or half-awake amidst the elaborate fantasy worlds that he’s created. When he meets Stéphanie, his artistic new neighbour, the two recognise each other as kindred spirits and a hesitant romance begins – one that soon comes under threat of being sabotaged by Stéphane’s eccentricity and the bizarre behaviour it produces.

What’s most immediately striking about The Science of Sleep, and what will likely stay with you afterwards, are its astonishing dream sequences. Gondry mixes expressionist sets with various physical animation techniques, including stop motion, to produce a window into his protagonist’s giddy mental landscape. It’s not particularly original, certainly less radical than the approach Gondry took in Eternal Sunshine, but the animation in particular is wonderful, and deeply refreshing after years of CGI. And it serves its purpose well as a representation of what’s going on inside Stéphane’s addled brain. At first it’s funny and charming, as at first Stéphane is; but the more familiar we become with his less appealing traits, the more uncomfortable and disturbing a place his interior world becomes.

Gondry makes it clear that Stéphane is so far removed from any kind of objective reality that he can’t properly function in the outside world – he’s like a very creative child, fascinating, wildly imaginative and utterly self-absorbed. As such he’s often hard to like, and harder to empathize with. Gael García Bernal plays his role bravely, not expecting us or even allowing is to be always on Stéphane’s side – he’s too distanced and unreliable for us to form a proper bond of understanding with.

The same goes for the other characters – all are frustrated and excluded by Stéphane’s determined rejection of reality. As such, The Science of Sleep is rarely the romantic comedy that its international trailer made it out to be; often it’s more of an anti-romantic comedy, in that it constantly highlights the impossibility of Stéphane and Stéphanie having any kind of a meaningful relationship. And it isn’t just Stéphane’s fault – Stéphanie is perhaps closer to the right side of sane, (although it’s hard to tell because we only see her character from the outside), but she’s almost as confused and neurotic. Charlotte Gainsbourg plays her so opaquely that neither she nor the script gives us any real explanation of her on-again, off-again affections.

The Science of Sleep is a daring film because it doesn’t invite us to, or let us, really empathize with its protagonists, just as they can’t really understand each other. People aren’t always predictable or rational or likeable or sympathetic, and neither are Stéphane and Stéphanie. But that does make a film hard to watch, because we want to like and sympathize with characters, we want to feel like we understand them, and Gondry deliberately takes those luxuries away from us. Viewed as a pop study of mental illness, it’s very effective; as a work of entertainment, it sometimes wavers. Still, like all of Gondry’s work, The Science of Sleep is fascinating in its willful quirkiness and constant hints of hidden depths – like a dream it’s enthralling in places, frustratingly ephemeral in others, but often oddly beautiful.