Though Tarnation is ostensibly about director Jonathan Caouette’s mother Renee, who was left mentally ill after years of electric shock therapy in 1950s Texan hospitals, it rapidly becomes a showcase for Caouette’s conspicuous talents and his own fractured, tenuous self.

Caouette’s bricolage of abstract and grainy, technicolor footage garnered from his twenty years of video-diary keeping and short-film making is well made and eerie. Caouette has been making short films and keeping video-diaries since he was eleven, and luckily for us, he's kept most of the footage. His spot-on impersonations of trailer-trash single mothers, surreptitiously filmed by torchlight while he was still pre-adolescent, show off natural acting talent and astute humour. They're weaved with intertitles, abstract sound and image sequences, and interviews with his way-out family and the film is a bit like the video-curse movie-riddle in The Ring.

No wonder his preview tapes caught the eyes of John Cameron Mitchell and Gus van Sant, whose names stud the opening titles. The stop-motion, abstract horror-trawl through Renee’s tortured history is matched by handheld, fly-on-the-wall home movies of Caouette’s grandparents, an eccentric pair who live in a claustrophobic, dirty-wallpaper house which in my imagination didn’t seem to be too far from the house where the Gein’s lived. Balanced against Caouette’s sweet nature is the obviously hellish places he's come from. Whether he’s meant it that way or not, his film contains numerous moments of really unsettling horror.

In Tarnation, still pictures, and abstract images communicate through stunning arrangements under colours and soundscapes and the entire film seems to ride the line between dream and nightmare.

Tarnation was edited on Apple’s iMovie home-editing software, a very straightforward program that allows home computer users to snap their footage together and then add titles and music before exporting to tape or disc so everyone can guffaw in the TV room over the kids’ fourty-second dog-washing meisterpiece. I could have done with less of the floating iMovie intertitling, but it makes sense that this film was finished this way. Consumerism and the mnemic calibrations of people who grew up in the MTV age are a (possibly accidental) sub-theme here, and they add a layer of interest onto the already stacked Tarnation. Caouette’s kinship with sound and image is joyous and abundant, and he seems made for films like this, which make other low-budget experimental films look even more disastrous than some of them already did.

Tarnation is hypnotic and unexpected.

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