Once seen, never forgotten, the work of Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer has a way of sticking around. This is only his second full-length feature (his first, an extraordinarily musty and creepy version of Carroll's Alice from 1980, was once incredibly shown as a kiddie Christmas serial by Channel 4). At the beginning, the Alan Bates-alike Petr Capek is given a map marked with a red 'X' by a man in the street. It's tossed away, but another arrives in his mail, and soon he decides to track down the mysterious dressing-room highlighted. There he dons the theatrical costume and make-up of Goethe's Faust and finds himself lured into a mysterious tale made flesh, tempted by demons, alchemic spells, and a Devilish deal that exchanges twenty-four years of pleasure for his eternal soul.

This, as befits Eastern European film-making, is a political film; Svankmajer is asking us to question the idea of what complacency means in the face of ultimate temptation. But what a Western audience will take from this elaborate fable are images of a most singular persuasion. Svankmajer is essentially an animator and the film brims with the remarkable imagery culled from his customary, grotesque claymation to puppet theatre's clacky-mouthed, life-sized marionettes. Even live action sequences take on an air of painstakingly composed unreality, with Capek's flesh and blood puppet manipulated at the hands of an artist.

By turn real, unreal and surreal, Faust witnesses the test tube gestation of a human foetus; miniature devils and angels that do unsightly battle over a man's soul; a dusky alchemist's laboratory; a dog fighting an old man for the severed leg he inexplicably lugs wrapped in newspaper; a sex scene of rare abhorrence. A '12' certificate can hide a multitude of perverse and ugly things.

Ostensibly possessed of a grim, Eastern European facade, comparisons are valid with the disturbing sepia bone, metal and cloth animations of The Brothers Quay; from a couple of years back with the Bolex Brothers' astounding animated feature The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb; and strangest of all, with all its dusty, foetid magik, Derek Jarman's truly alchemic reading of The Tempest.

97 minutes of Faust is too much, blessed as the second half is with a couple of over-literary, dramatically arid patches, but flaws seem to mean less in the face of such uncommon invention. Anyone familiar with Svankmajer's oft-screened and celebrated shorts (Dimensions of Dialogue, Down in the Cellar and the rest) or Alice will know what to expect; for newcomers a mental health warning is required. This is a visceral and unsettling trip indeed.