When I was a little girl, a relative gave me a beautiful book filled with illustrations of unicorns and blank facing pages to write on. I wrote a story around each illustration, trying to tie all the different unicorns and locations together. When I was older, I read this story to some girls I babysat. “What crap writing,” I thought, and even apologized for the higgeldy-piggelty plot that jumped from continent to continent with relatively little purpose. The girls not only dismissed my apology, but told me that they loved the story, and urged me to keep reading.

The Fall has a rather similar concept and result. Director Tarsem (of The Cell fame) lends his lush music video aesthetics to feature-length film in a project that’s been shelved since 2006 and finally distributed in part by he efforts of David Fincher & Spike Jonze. The Fall is a sort of dark fantasy. In a 1930’s Los Angeles hospital, a paralyzed and mortally depressed actor, Roy (Lee Pace), recounts an epic story of revenge to fellow patient Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a little girl from an impoverished immigrant family.

As the visually sumptuous story unfurls across nations and Roy sinks deeper into drug abuse, the tale becomes entwined with reality. Characters in the story are pulled from Alexandria’s experiences. She’s more familiar with India than Native Americans, so when Roy mentions an Indian, she envisons the character as a man from India. A note Alexandria writes and carefully cuts into snowflake shape makes its way into maps and letters in the story. Little details from either world are passed silently to the other. It’s an entertaining exercise for the audience to spot them all and make sense of the ones they might have missed.

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Staring: Catinca Untaru, Lee Pace

Directed by: Tarsem

Written by: Dan Gilroy, Nico Soultanakis, Tarsem. Based on “Yo Ho Ho,” a 1981 Bulgarian screenplay by Valeri Petrov.

The film’s major draw is the artistic appeal. The Fall was shot on location in 18 countries and several very distinctive landmarks. The color palette used for the film is hyper-saturated with deep contrasts. Even in the hospital, every shot is a sight to behold. There are a few remarkable and hard-to-miss graphic matches between scenes, like when an evil priest’s face dissolves into a bone-white desert.

Though there are strong themes of drug abuse and suicide, the story Roy tells Alexandria is not twisted, and is more approachable than the uncomfortable and disturbing story of The Cell. The Fall is rather unique in its treatment of relationships and storytelling. Roy and Alexandria are fast friends, but their conversations are very natural and frequently a little awkward. The story lacks any real direction or purpose up to the point where Roy and Alexandria paint their avatars into it. At this point, it becomes a metaphor for their own lives and relationships, and the ideology wobbles between the hopeless nihilism and youthful optimism of the story tellers.

Because of this, the movie may feel a little slow to start, or even be purposefully meandering. The story is told in the same way that most people tell stories: imperfect, nonsensical, and riddled with bad lines. Pace is perfectly convincing as an addict on the brink, but not at all convincing as the dashing hero of the revenge story. The editing makes it difficult to follow who’s who and what people are saying behind closed doors - important conversations just out of Alexandria’s earshot. These style choices are clever, but the sur/realist approach often obscures itself.

The Fall is like a box of fine dark chocolate that you accidentally left in your car on a hot afternoon: messy, slightly ruined, but not enough that you won’t eat and enjoy it. Though the story falls short of charming, Alexandria’s unique and mischievous personality, the subtle symbolism, and the epic’s breathtaking composition might be enough to warrant a salvaged feast.