WARNING: strong constitution required!

[fredxmertz]

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this movie is pretty powerful, but not for the faint of heart. it opened with a kind of disclaimer by Terry Gilliam:

based on the book by Mitch Cullin. SPOILER ALERT! don't read below if you want to keep the suspense happening.

From NPR.org"
Gilliam added that appeal after his experience at film festivals in Europe, where some audience members walked out. Some departed in the film's opening minutes, in the scene where the girl, played by 12-year-old Jodelle Ferland, is preparing heroin for her father, played by Jeff Bridges. Other viewers bolted when they saw her sitting on a dead man's lap.
Gilliam — the creator of such acclaimed films as The Fisher King and Brazil — hopes the film finds more success on DVD.
Gilliam says that the movie, which also stars Jennifer Tilly, is "about people in search for love, it's about relationships. It's also about drugs, sex and necrophilia. What more would you want in a movie?" he adds with a laugh.
Tideland, based on a novel by Mitch Cullin, found opposition even before it was made. With such a dark and unusual story, Gilliam had a hard time getting financing.
But he persisted, he says, "because I think it was genuinely a good story to tell. The fact is a lot of the public won't like it, but I'm actually interested in the part of the public that will."

From Publishers Weekly
Traces of Faulkner's A Rose for Emily and faint echoes of the horror film classic Psycho infuse this highly charged, eccentrically imaginative narrative by the author of Branches. The unusual tale comprises mainly dialogues between 11-year-old Jeliza-Rose and her four bodiless Barbie doll heads as she wanders about the isolated landscape of a house beside the railroad tracks in bleak rural Texas, interrupted periodically by the dynamite exploding in a nearby limestone quarry. Jeliza-Rose's mother is dead from a heroin overdose.
The girl's father, 67-year-old Noah, a drug-addicted, has-been rock guitarist, leaves his wife's corpse on the bed in their sleazy L.A. apartment and takes his abused, disturbed daughter on a Greyhound bus to his long-dead mother's home. There Noah pins a map of Denmark on the wall and sits and stares trancelike for days on end. Jeliza-Rose soon encounters Dell, an eccentric neighbor woman who wears a beekeeper's veil and has a brain-damaged brother named Dickens.
Precocious (and often pretentious) conversations between Jeliza-Rose and her Barbie heads (one is named Classique) serve to illumine the girl's disturbed state of mind and to further the surreal plot. As Jeliza-Rose's fantasy world collides with Dell's appalling secret, a grotesque history is revealed. This brutal portrait of a young girl's unbearable childhood requires immersion in her fevered imagination, and is relieved only at the end by Jeliza-Rose's brave effort to save herself from total breakdown. (Aug.2005)