Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
After a carnival troupe saves his life, a man agrees to help its immortal leader collect five souls and win a bet with the devil.
Terry Gilliam's visually audacious fantasy is a genuine one-of-a-kind creation, blending baroque imagination with Heath Ledger's tragic final performance — handled ingeniously by recasting him with multiple actors inside the mirror world. The cinematography and production design are spectacular, with each journey through the mirror yielding surreal, vividly distinct dreamscapes. The ensemble acting, including Ledger, Plummer, Waits, and the replacement trio, is committed and compelling. However, the narrative is characteristically Gilliam-chaotic, and the ending feels somewhat unsatisfying and anticlimactic given the mythic stakes established throughout.