I took this in earlier this year via Netflix and it just stayed and stayed on my mind—the music, the imagery, the ideas, the fantastic implausible strangeness coupled with a dry pseudo-documentary format. I couldn’t get it out of my mind so I finally just bought the DVD myself and now it’s on constant replay chez moi.

Peter Greenaway is often strange, focusing at times on visual impact over narrative coherence, but when he does that it’s for good and pleasing reason. This isn’t exactly what’s going on in The Falls but it’s still a very unconventional way of telling a story.

I can tell the story with no spoilers, since the story really isn’t the point. Sometime many years before the time of the film occurred a “Violent Unknown Event (VUE)” which is strongly suggested involved the incomplete metamorphosis of some 19 million people into birds. Theories as to why and how this happened abound and are explored through the medium of short biographical films about 92 VUE victims, their pasts, their presents, their immortality and occasiona deaths. Some entries are drily factual, others fanciful, some highly plausible and others unutterably bizarre, some verge on the Dada.

At nearly 3 1/2 hours this may try the patience of some, but on DVD with each film as its own chapter you can take in as much or as little as you want. Just don’t space it out too much—part of the fun is piecing it all together and catching onto the relationships among the victims.