Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths film review — Iñárritu puts himself in the picture

The title, especially for those up on their Buddhist theology and readers of American experimental writer George Saunders, is rather a giveaway. So don’t go complaining about spoilers if this review reveals that Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths unfolds in a dreamlike liminal space. It’s blindingly obvious anyway from the off, given that this latest feature from writer-director Alejandro G Iñárritu (The Revenant, Birdman) opens with a long shadow cast by an unseen figure who, judging by the shadow, is able to lift off the ground like an ethereal spirit. Or perhaps one weighing only 21 Grams, the title of another Iñárritu feature.

Bardo plays like a greatest hits album, constantly dropping allusions, quotes and Easter egg-like references to its director’s previous work. (The presence of a few stray mutts harks back to his first and best film, 2000’s Amores Perros.) As the story of documentarian Silverio (Daniel Giménez Cacho) unfolds, scenes merging seamlessly into each other through liquid editing, it becomes obvious that this is Iñárritu’s self-reflective midlife-crisis movie. Like his creator, Silverio is a Mexican film-maker fiercely proud of his homeland and its culture, even if he lives most of the time in Los Angeles, where he gets all the love that the Mexican industry won’t show him.

As Silverio struggles to write an acceptance speech for an upcoming lifetime achievement ceremony across the border, he revisits his native roots in a number of increasingly weird but magnificently choreographed and luminously lit tableau sequences. An interview on a talk show blurs into a riotous party that bleeds into a weird historical re-enactment in which Silverio meets the conquistador Cortes on top of a pile of corpses representing the victims of colonisation.

As an example of maximalist cinema — all the rage these days — it’s undoubtedly impressive, but also rather exhausting. Maybe the most telling moment comes when a critic of Silverio disrupts the film’s spell by dropping a fatal truth bomb: the film-maker makes everything oneiric, he says, to disguise the fact that he doesn’t have anything meaningful to say.

★★★☆☆

In UK and US cinemas from November 18 and on Netflix from December 16