Tarsem Singh’s The Fall is The English Patient crossed with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. It’s a fantastical children’s tale with a bonus montage of silent cinema and the birth of stuntmen. It’s the only fictional tale I’ve seen which references the Sikh farmers of California’s Central Valley. It’s part cheesy, part brilliant, and it put a big smile on my face.

As the film opens, an absolutely adorable child actress whose mother tongue is not English toddles across the screen. Her arm is held up by an old-style cast, a white rod distancing her upper arm from her side. She drops a holey note off a balcony; it flutters in through an open window to a handsome young silent movie actor who’s laid up in bed. The would-be stuntman jumped a horse off a railroad trestle to impress his girl. This male Scheherazade spins the child a fantastical tale to get her to supply him with morphine and preparations more potent.

His tale-within-a-tale opens with a keshdari Sikh (Jeetu Verma) swimming across a sapphire reef, hair streaming across his traps, knife strapped to his upper thigh. As he dries off and dons a theatrical crescent turban, we’re introduced to four other rogues. Save for a nebbish Charles Darwin, they’re ethnic stereotypes all, which actually works here as a children’s story. Other characters include dreadlocked sanyasis conducting penances both terrible and hilarious. In one scene they sing a living tattoo map into being with yips, warehouse rave moves and the bass track to ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy.’

In real life, the girl runs around the infirmary, scared by an X-ray technician in a welder’s mask with a T-shaped opening. The same gladiatorial shape is reused in the bad guys’ helmets. They’re outfitted in black leathers, barking and chirping instead of emitting human speech. They are sadomasochistic stormtroopers of Singh’s dark soul.

The T-mask is just one of the many bits of eyecandy wit. Singh’s cinematographic style is the visual equivalent of upmarket fiction. He repeats several motifs in different forms, a child’s missing front teeth standing in for elephant tusks rhymed with dentures, a toothy ornament by a pool paired with ice tongs. A child is like a monkey in a bag, her brains like butterflies. A muscular African is lensed in the foreground, outracing a dark elephant underwater. Cryptic notes and maps end up riddled with lozenge-shaped holes. Like Salman Rushdie, Singh comes from the ad world and is bursting with ideas. Here he plays hide-the-motif, like the iconic vodka bottle shape hidden throughout the short film Mulit.

The movie is at its heart an ad for Indian tourism– the lake palace in Udaipur, the blue city of Jodhpur, Jantar Mantar in Delhi, and someplace that resembles Humayun’s tomb. Other gorgeous locations include Fiji, Bali, and a brilliant white sand desert which resembles the sumptuous backgrounds in Dil Se (From the Heart).

Let’s be plain: the adventure tale is a music video, shallow, melodramatic and silly. The love interest delivers her lines like Keanu Reeves with a yoni, both horrible and pretty. But there’s a pulsing heart to this tale. Faces from the real-life yarn show up in the fictional adventure like a modern-day Usual Suspects. Characters morph in real time as the child makes whimsical demands of the storyteller. There’s a brilliant and frightening animation sequence, namesake to the title, which puts you in mind of Tim Burton’s best.

Like Serenity, this isn’t a mainstream movie, but it is stuffed to the gills with genre brilliance. For a certain kind of audience, you’d be hard-pressed to top this flick.

The trailer: