Touted as “this year’s Napoleon Dynamite”, Eagle Vs Shark is a weird, sweet, nerdy love story between a mousy fast-food worker (Lily) and a videogame-obsessive with anger issues (Jarrod), brought together at a ‘come as your favourite animal’ fancy-dress party (dressed, obviously, as an eagle and a shark). It soon becomes clear that Jarrod is far less focused on Lily than he is on tracking down his old school bully from 10 years ago, and making him pay.

This odd, morbid revenge story kicks off a chain of events that take the film to a much darker place than Napoleon Dynamite. The characters in Eagle Vs Shark, although seriously odd, still manage to seem like real (albeit slightly brain-damaged) people rather than geeky caricatures – a family suicide, an unrequited love and a desperate quest for paternal approval all add a gloomy touch of reality to the all-pervading oddness.

Shot in a remote New Zealand town, the windswept, empty roads and clifftops bring to mind Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste (albeit with fewer exploding sheep) rather than a romantic comedy. It is still a comedy, though, and there’s lots of funny stuff on offer, mostly as Jarrod prepares to meet his nemesis. Lily, meanwhile, is the heart of the film, with her dogged determination to win Jarrod over, although why she wants to is anyone’s guess.

Some people might find Eagle Vs Shark’s calculated strangeness a bit over the top – the occasional cuts to scenes of stop-motion-animated apple cores running away from ants aren’t entirely necessary – but if you can forgive its wilful indie-ness, there’s a lot here to like.