There are some film-makers about whom the word auteur does not seem simply a silly title. They are, self-consciously, artists who work towards a personal vision and march to the beat of their own drummer. Such film-makers often have fraught relations with producers, studios and the established powers that be in the film industry.

But one probably has to go back to Orson Welles to find one who had such a gift of making himself impossible in the industry, or tripping himself up, as Terry Gilliam. There is an almost child-like quality to how they will on occasion pile a budget and a half in a big bonfire, set it alight, stand in front of it while flipping the bird and blowing a raspberry with a manic grin on their faces, tape it, and send it to the Grand Poobahs at the studio with a big red bow on top.

The predictable result is that such film-makers end up having to make do with budgets that could fit in a shoe-box, scraped together in the indie-market, a lot of the time, and some times even creating their best work in the process. David Lynch's "Blue Velvet", made on the heels of the mega budget flop "Dune", comes to mind.

Gilliam's latest work, "Tideland", which is only now making its tortuous way towards cinematic release in the US, is also such a small scale labour of love. Though opinions are decidedly mixed as to how artistically successful the resulting film is.

It is without a doubt a challenging movie, and hardly one that will find favour with a wider audience. It's as if he went into the film on a dare, making a wager with himself, and the world at large, on how dark, tragic and disturbing a movie he could make, while still making it charming, magical, even whimsical.

Gilliam's sense of the absurd, used to comic effect in his work in Monty Python, and such films as "Time Bandits", is existential in nature, and deeply tragic at its core. Nowhere, not even in the dystopia "Brazil", or the outright apocalyptic "Twelve Monkeys", has that tragic strain been closer to the surface than in "Tideland".

The film is based on Mitch Cullin's novel of the same name. And the plot, as described in the press material, is as follows:

Tideland depicts the world of Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland), a world where fireflies have names, squirrels talk, and the heads of four dolls, long since separated from their bodies, keep her company.

Both Jeliza-Rose's parents are junkies. When her mother (Jennifer Tilly) dies, she embarks on a strange journey with her father, Noah (Jeff Bridges), a rock and roll musician well past his prime. The film drifts between reality and fantasy as Jeliza-Rose escapes the vast loneliness of her new existence into the fantasy world created in her own mind.

The film drifts between reality and fantasy as Jeliza-Rose escapes the vast loneliness of her new existence into the fantasy world that exists in her imagination. In this world fireflies have names, squirrels talk, and the heads of four dolls, long since separated from their bodies, keep her company: Mystique, Baby Blonde, Glitter Gal and Sateen Lips, until she meets Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), a mentally damaged young man with the mind of a ten-year-old. Dressed in a wet suit and diving mask, he spends his days hiding out in a junk heaped wig-wam turned submarine, waiting to catch the monster shark that inhabits the railway tracks. Then there's his older sister Dell (Janet McTeer), a tall ghost-like figure dressed in black who hides behind a beekeeper's mesh hood.

This almost makes it sound lighthearted, as it skips such small nuggets of information (spoiler ahead) that the father dies while floating on that tideland ocean of heroin just after they arrive at the run down Texas prairie farm house that once belonged to Jeliza-Rose' grandmother, and spends the rest of the film very much present and accounted for, while being very much dead.

It is a question how much of what follows is real, and how much is part of Jeliza-Rose' survival mechanism fantasy, fuelled by her father's drug inspired pipe dreams of the two of them going to Jutland in Denmark, his stoned lyrical mumblings of the sea, pictures of bog-mummies, her own reading of "Alice in Wonderland", "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe", and sundry other sources. In this regard the film is sure to be compared, probably unfavourably by most, to Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth", which also has a young female protagonist escaping an all too harsh reality into a realm of the fantastic.

The harshness of that reality is brilliantly brought across in the opening scenes of the film. Jeliza-Rose, who is obviously used to carrying the lion's share of the responsibility in this dysfunctional parent-child relationship, is in the kitchen, fixing up her father's fix, with the bored routine of long experience, before helping him shoot up.

There is a chilling matter of factness to this scene that outshines anything in Darren Aronofsky's overwrought and overrated "Reefer Madness: Millennium Edition", "Requiem for a Dream". And if Gilliam had partly parted company with the book, and its Southern Gothic phantasmagoria, at this point, the film might have been the better for it.

What saves the venture from tipping over into the laughable, in a bad way, is a tour de force performance by the then 10 year old Jodelle Ferland. As in the film, it's on her slender shoulders that the responsibility for keeping things going rests. And she delivers a performance to match Anna Paquin's Oscar winning role in "The Piano".

Despite her age, Ferland has built quite a resume for herself, with a decided list towards the Christina Ricciesque and spooky. She was last seen in "Silent Hill", which, though it was shot later, saw a far quicker release on US screens. She's also amassed a substantial back catalogue of television roles, such as the ghostly little girl in Stephen King's remake of Lars von Trier's "Kingdom Hospital".

Ferland, alone, playing against two finger-puppets made from the heads of a couple of decapitated Barbie-dolls, holds more drama than any number of sticks of dynamite, madwomen out of the attic, talking squirrels and desiccated corpses can add to the proceedings.

Jennifer Tilly (as the bipolar mother from Hell) and Jeff Bridges are fun to watch, but are in fact relegated to bit parts, while Brendan Fletcher, as the brain damaged Dickens, and his taxidermist sister Dell, played by Janet McTeer, are too close to caricature to inform the characters with much nuance.

In the end the film shares the same virtues, and suffers the same vices, as the book. The language and images are virtuoso works of art. But the plot lacks internal narrative logic and cohesion. Stuff just happens, often for no better reason than an almost adolescent glee in piling on the weird and shocking. And while the virtues outweigh the vices enough to keep you going, the viewer/reader is left non-plussed as to what it all amounts to in the end. Both novel and film are, sadly, less than the sum of their parts. But what parts they are!

Gilliam's alternately sun-drenched and Pre-Raphaelite images at times create frames that you just wish you could somehow print out on canvas in oils. But one ends up wistfully longing for another picture, one in which Gilliam and Ferland's prodigious talents were put to better, and less contrived use.