Set almost entirely in and around a dilapidated farmhouse inhabited by a ten-year-old girl, Terry Gilliam's defiantly disturbing Tideland comes as close to being a feature-length soliloquy as any movie since Secret Honor, Robert Altman's 1984 adaptation of a one-man show about Nixon. When the movie begins, little Jeliza-Rose (astonishing newcomer Jodelle Ferland) has parents, though just barely — both her father (Jeff Bridges, barely recognizable) and mother (Jennifer Tilly, taking a rare break from the poker table) are unrepentant junkies, perfectly happy to let their only child cook up their junk and clean up their filth. When Mom inevitably ODs, Dad and daughter head for his childhood home, abandoned many years earlier, whereupon the head of the household settles into a comfortable armchair and deliberately nods out forever. This leaves Jeliza-Rose alone, but hardly lonesome — in addition to the slowly putrefying corpse of her father, with which she plays increasingly garish dress-up games, she has the very chatty company of several decapitated Barbie heads, worn on her fingers and prone to high-pitched, anxious monologues that hint at the orphan's semi-comprehension of her predicament.
By this point, you probably have a pretty good sense of whether Tideland is your kind of movie or not. When it screened for the press at last year's Toronto Film Festival, critics fled the theater in droves; the words "unwatchable" and "disaster" were bandied about for days afterward.
I'm sorely tempted to retaliate with "misunderstood" and "masterpiece," but in fact it's a mesmerizing failure — courageously uncompromised and endlessly evocative, but also evidence that pure, uncut Gilliam, like smack, can result in an ugly overdose. So long as the film sticks to Jeliza-Rose and her solitary exploits, it conjures a truly disquieting portrait of childhood solipsism; unfortunately, Mitch Cullin's source novel also features a pair of bizarro neighbors — a one-eyed beekeeper and taxidermist (Janet McTeer) and her mentally deficient brother (Brendan Fletcher) — and these characters unleash Gilliam's penchant for unrestrained grotesquerie, repeatedly breaking the spell. Still, I'd sooner revisit this dank, morbid semi-fiasco than endure a second round of The Brothers Grimm's hectic pyrotechnics. Better Gilliam on steroids than Gilliam on autopilot.
— Mike D'Angelo