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Takeshi Kitano, the writer/director/star of ultra-violent yet poignant films such as Sonatine and Brother, delivers a wry, comedy-laced drama that’ll leave you wondering what the hell you’ve just experienced. It’s his greatest project to date.

The film opens in the realm of reality, with Kitano the actor wrapping another of his gangster flicks and the audience being introduced to the characters that surround him in his business and personal life.

At the studio, Kitano encounters a struggling actor who not only shares the same name, but – with the exception of dyed blonde hair – is his doppelgänger.

We then see Kitano falling asleep and imagining the kind of existence his dead ringer leads. The subsequent dream pictures the ‘blonde’ Kitano as a convenience store manager interacting with Kitano’s numerous associates, who all play similarly shifting roles.

It’s at this point that the film takes a surreal turn, as ‘blonde’ Kitano starts having his own dreams within Kitano’s dream. In them, he becomes obsessed with the real Kitano’s on-screen gangster persona, and runs amok through a series of hallucinatory scenarios.

Confused? You will be, because you’re watching the cinematic equivalent of a mentally stimulating puzzle. This movie unfolds like a twisted homage to the real-life Kitano and his work, visualised by David Lynch as an episode of The Twilight Zone.

For example, one of ‘blonde’ Kitano’s dreams within Kitano’s dream portrays him as a cabbie ferrying a young male geisha-impersonator, his agent and two gigantic adult babies along a road littered with blood-spattered bodies – before careering into darkness, screaming.

Elsewhere, bizarre dance numbers come out of the blue, as does a huge animated caterpillar.

Viewing this trippy extravaganza, it seems as if Kitano felt he’d accomplished everything he wanted to within his oeuvre, and that in order to move forward he needed to deconstruct his creative process.

It’s a decision that may see fans of his more brutal flicks fall by the wayside. This isn’t likely to bother him, however, given that Takeshis’ is undeniably the vision of someone with no concern for either commerciality or critical opinion.

The fact is, Kitano’s making films for no-one other than himself, which is an admirable and enviable position for any artist to be in.

Ultimately, this volatile mix of hilarity, hardboiled violence and warped sensibilities is cinema as catharsis. A stroke of mind-blowing, non-linear genius, summed up in one of the movie’s song lyrics: “Let’s meet in our dreams.”