Holy Motors, review - Telegraph There will be no wilder, weirder movie out this year than Leos Carax's Holy Motors, an often jaw-droppingly bonkers dive into the id. It's not for the faint-hearted or anyone who sets high store by conventional narrative logic. Like an aggressively doolally circus showman, Carax shoves us into our seats for an amusement-park ride through the subconscious, making pit-stops wherever he feels like it. This long-awol enfant terrible of the French arthouses hasn't made a feature since 1999"s comparatively sane Melville adaptation Pola X, though he did contribute a segment to the 2008 portmanteau film Tokyo!, starring Denis Lavant as a green-clad, plant-chomping hobgoblin emerging from the sewer. Once seen, never forgotten, this character returns here as just one of the 11 roles Lavant takes on in a staggering feat of actorly athleticism. Alec Guinness's octathlon in Kind Hearts and Coronets may just have been trumped. And how. The linking character is Monsieur Oscar, a tycoon who bids goodbye to his family one morning and steps into a stretch limousine, to be chauffeured around a barely recognisable Paris by his faithful driver Céline (Edith Scob). He has a series of appointments, all of which require cosmetic transformation - it doesn't just happen by magic. As Lavant applies face-putty, wigs, false nails and a fake cataract, we see the workings of each new persona, but they're not merely disguises: he feels reincarnated each time, rebooted. First he's a bag lady, then a black-clad motion capture performer contorting his limbs (and other parts) in the role of a randy reptilian alien. Then it's the sewer man's turn to rampage around a graveyard terrifying onlookers by stuffing his face with wreaths. This extraordinary Rumpelstiltskin interrupts a fashion shoot, kidnaps Eva Mendes, and takes her to a cave, where things happen that Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast didn't prepare us for. He eats her hair. I can't think of the last film that made me clamp my hand to my face while lurching forward, gasping and then laughing in sheer astonishment, but this sequence did, frequently. What it's about exactly, who can say? The parameters keep shifting. Carax loads the second half with strange, sad encounters in parallel lives - Kylie Minogue, memorably, singing an ex-lover's torch song along the dusty walkways of a derelict department store. We're left with a vast amount to puzzle over and process. One thing's for sure: you may struggle to wrest unified meaning out of this entirely irreducible movie, but like Kylie's other featured song, you can't get it out of your head.