When a movie starts out with this:

The end of the millennium marked the end of many things.  Natural resources dried up, the global financial markets crashed, and the crisis that connected the fate of all people, still left the individual isolated in his ruin.

It’s pretty safe to say we won’t be watching a rollicking comedy.  The folks at Tribeca sent me a copy of Metropia, which is definitely no rollicking comedy.

Metropia follows a world where what we described above is the new reality–all fueled by the conspiracy theorists’ specter of “peak oil”.   But Europe, as is so generally the case with Europe, decided that the only way they were going to save themselves from this catastrophe was through a massive public works project–the Metro.  The Metro is essentially a gigantic subway system that connects Europe from one end to the other.  But for one man, a telephone call center operator who hates the Metro due in large part to the voices he constantly hears when traveling in it, his discovery that the government is keeping a lot closer tabs on him than he realizes leads him to join up with an unlikely resistance crew, including a famous shampoo model.

Metropia looks for all the world like that music video that JibJab made for Weird Al’s “Do I Freak You Out?” song, and yet it’s got an A-list array of voices.  Udo Kier, Juliette Lewis, Stellan Skarsgard–they’re all in here.  And they’re in the single most incongruous dystopia I’VE EVER SEEN.

It’s like watching Happy Tree Friends stage Mad Max.  A bunch of characters who are building a strip mall in the middle of the Uncanny Valley describe, with utter nonchalance, government control of their lives that would make George Orwell wet himself.  How can I be anything BUT creeped out by this?  The world they inhabit is so gray, so nearly devoid of color, that it’s oddly compelling in its way.  The plot running through this, especially the farther in you get, is full of surprises, and many of them are not pleasant ones.

If there is a problem with Metropia, it’s that it’s trying so hard to be creepy–and it really IS creepy, I’ve used that word a lot here but there’s just no two ways about it–that it forgets in many places to be coherent.  Large portions of the storyline are lost in the background, but since the background is so wildly over the top, it’s almost forgivable.  Metropia manages to get its point across WITHOUT anyone paying attention to the plot, and that’s a downright rarity.

Metropia is a wildly creepy pastiche of governments run horribly amok and the everyman’s response to same, and thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale gives this bizarre, unnerving baffler an eight out of ten for maximum effect, if not necessarily maximum coherence.