Twenty Years Under the Tracks: Tideland Turns 20

On 11 August 2006, Terry Gilliam's Tideland opened in UK cinemas, the film's actual world premiere had come nearly a year earlier, at the 2005 Toronto International Film Festival, but for British audiences this month marks two decades since they first met Jeliza-Rose. Twenty years on, it remains one of the most divisive entries in Gilliam's filmography: a film he himself introduced by warning, "many of you are not going to like this film."

Adapted from Mitch Cullin's novel by Gilliam and longtime collaborator Tony Grisoni, Tideland follows Jeliza-Rose (Jodelle Ferland, then eleven years old), a child left to fend for herself on a derelict Texas farmstead after the deaths of her drug-addicted parents, played by Jeff Bridges and Jennifer Tilly. Gilliam described it as "Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho", a description that undersells just how far the film is willing to go. Decomposition, addiction, and a friendship with an adult brain-damaged neighbour, Dickens (Brendan Fletcher), all filter through the unbroken lens of a child's imagination, narrated by Jeliza-Rose herself through the disembodied heads of her dolls.

Critical reaction at the time split hard down the middle; some called it Gilliam's most personal and purely imaginative work since Brazil; others, including several who reviewed it for the US release in October 2006, found it an uncomfortable, punishing watch. That split has calcified into the film's reputation: not a film people are lukewarm on, but one they either treasure or can't sit through twice. Notably, Tideland was made with none of the studio interference that had shaped Gilliam's earlier, more famous fights over Brazil and The Brothers Grimm, this was Gilliam with total creative control, for better and for worse depending on who you ask.

Twenty years later, it's aged into something closer to a cult object than a curiosity: the film that shows what Gilliam does when nobody's stopping him.